What is a textician? A technician of language who collaborates with scientists to help them get their research into the world? A tactician, a magician, a weaver of texts? Or maybe all of those things?
In October 2025, I invited Scholarly Communication founder Daniel Shea, now a professional textician at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, to join me in a lively conversation exploring how good texts get made — and made better — in various disciplinary contexts.
In the first hour of this free WriteSPACE Special Event, I had a conversation with Daniel about how scientific researchers and texticians work collaboratively and whether writers can become their own textician, among other topics. In the second hour, we ran a hands-on workshop for WriteSPACE members in which Daniel and I collaborated with the participants to analyze three different texts.
Here is WriteSPACE Event Manager Amy Lewis’ personal account of the live event.
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This was such a fascinating Special Event because it began with a word I had never heard before: Textician!
Daniel didn't set out to invent a new profession. He started in Heidelberg running a writing centre for scientists who were publishing in English. But when he moved to Karlsruhe's computer science department, he had an epiphany: every wet lab has a technician who knows how to run the equipment. The biologists understand the molecular magic, but they need someone who actually knows how to set up the microscope. So why not have a textician—someone who knows how the equipment of text actually works?
I think textician is a beautiful word: it invokes the technician, yes, but also the tactician (because academic writing is strategic), and lurking behind both, the magician. The role sits somewhere between editor, collaborator, and Socratic questioner. Daniel doesn't fix sentences (although he loves to). He asks questions that make researchers reflect on what they're actually trying to accomplish. "Sometimes they'll say, 'We structured the introduction this way because that's what we're supposed to do,'" Daniel explained. "And I'll say, 'That's a partially good reason because you don't want to alienate your readers. But if you just copy exactly what everyone else is doing, you might not actually achieve what you want.'"
An interesting metaphor that came up was the Fire Hose Problem. In computer science and engineering, researchers say that reading the endless torrent of new papers is like trying to drink from a fire hose. Reader attention becomes the most precious commodity. You might have only seconds before they scroll to the next article. So there’s an interesting conundrum here. Some formulaic writing exists precisely so that people can skim quickly (abstracts; lit reviews; methods sections). But if it’s too formulaic, your work becomes invisible in the deluge. Daniel's job is helping researchers navigate that line: conventional enough to be legible, distinctive enough to be noticed.
The fascinating part? Different subfields develop wildly different textual cultures. In network security and cybersecurity, for example, nearly every other paper title is a pun—sometimes a pun on a previous pun. "They started referring so intertextually to existing titles that people knew quite well and played on those plays on words," Daniel told us. "It was an entirely new sub-trend showing this culture of playfulness."
Why? Because security researchers spend their days breaking systems to find vulnerabilities—they're professional creative destroyers. "Thank God they're on our side," Daniel laughed. That playful, hacking mindset shows up in how they write. But move over to software architecture? Totally different: far more serious, far less pun-based.
Another interesting point that came up was that Daniel doesn't just edit manuscripts—he "edits authors," by which he means that editing is as much about the relationship with the author as the text itself. The editing relationship is indeed a full-blown working relationship, and it's only partially focused on the manuscript — a dynamic that is worlds away from "send me your draft and I'll fix it up." Daniel says one must be a good listener to be a good editor. You need to understand not just the content but the specific journal culture, the reviewer expectations, the rhetorical moves that will work in this venue for this audience.
Scientific disciplines often lack the textual scaffolding that humanities scholars (Daniel’s own background) take for granted. "If you're in history, philosophy, or literature, you spend your entire studies reading texts, often because of the text," Daniel noted. "You care if this philosopher uses that kind of expression versus another. That's just not happening in most areas of science and engineering." So when Daniel encounters a textual choice that seems odd, he traces it back with questions. Sometimes researchers end up sheepishly admitting: "That's what my high school English teacher told me." Daniel's gentle response? "That's interesting. Right now, though, you're doing a PhD, so I don't know if that's relevant anymore."
And then there was the AI question (there's always an AI question)!
“Is AI usurping Daniel's expertise?” one participant asked. Not at all! In fact, Daniel replied, his current colleagues are often skeptical about AI's utility for their work. AI runs into two fundamental limitations:
The innovation problem: AI works with what's there and generates texts that look like what other texts have looked like, Daniel explained. But research depends on something changing and on new contributions being reformulated in entirely new ways. That 5-10% of truly novel content? That's where he and the authors he works with spend most of their time — and that's the part AI can't handle because, by definition, it hasn't been done before.
The relationship problem: AI doesn't write the way humans write. It can't help with the psychological aspects of the writing process, can't offer tailored techniques for specific problems, can't be the collaborator who listens and asks the right questions at the right time. As Daniel put it: Editing authors actually means being in a collaborative relationship with an author and their text, as opposed to taking their text and fixing it.
Throughout the conversation, one truth kept surfacing: writing is hard. The textician's role isn't to make writing easy; it's to make the struggle productive. To ask the questions that unlock meaning. To help researchers find the precise formulation that will make reviewers and readers pay attention. To be the technician who knows which linguistic buttons to press, the tactician who understands the rhetorical battlefield, and yes, occasionally, the magician who helps words cast their spell.
A warm thank you to Helen for hosting and to Daniel for sharing his insights, as well as to all the writers who joined us for this conversation! If you'd like to learn more about Daniel's work, you can find his Scholarly Communication podcast here.
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