An intention to communicate

I would suggest then that the very fact of creating a text for public view implies that the writer has an interest in making something manifest to someone other than himself. He is indicating his intention to communicate. This may seem trite, but it is a necessary presupposition to any attempt to interpret an utterance. If a writer has the intention to communicate, then the effort of interpretation is not a futile one. It may not be successful, but it is certainly worth the effort. Authorial intention has been regarded as an irrecoverable notion in recent scholarship, but given the communicator’s ‘intention to inform’ it is a legitimate exercise to attempt to find clues to such intention in the speech or text, even if there is no certainty.—Margaret Sim, A Relevant Way to Read, 2