Intertexuality

Many texts written rely somewhat on a look at other texts that either relate to the style or the subject matter for which you as an author are writing. For example, Nelson, the engineer, writes proposals for different companies. He uses a wide variety of resources to complete his writing process including previous texts written.
A text begins with a set of ideas, those ideas are put together in an outline, and then built on from there. Many authors use other pieces of writing to help mold their own. In the situation of Nelson, the types of documents that he composes follow a particular set of guidelines. They often have a similar style for each different document and can even sometimes share some of the same information.
Case studies and research articles can follow this same sort of building upon an idea and then using other resources and pieces of texts to build the final product. I looked up several psychological research papers, something that I may be interested in doing, and found that many of them had the same style. I also found sets of facts that were recycled throughout each article. When composing one paper compared to another, it was evident that to reach the final product would have been more difficult without the ability to look back at other texts and sets of facts. It is often necessary to use other peoples works, or even previous works of your own, to compose an entirely new text. Many texts can relate to one other, and even rely on one another even if each piece is about something entirely different.