A Short Guide on Collaborative Writing

You probably have some understandable anxieties and confusions about writing a collaborative essay, so the following discussion will help you begin this task. Working in a group has its special joys and frustrations, but it is a skill that is very important in today’s workplace. As messy and perhaps painful as this process can be, it is useful experience whether the whole enterprise flops or ends beautifully.

The main benefit of working in a group (as I hope you have seen with peer response) is that two or three or more heads are better than one and four working together are stronger than one alone. Working together as a group requires a few guiding principles that I’ll list below:

• A willingness to entertain other people’s opinions and not have to be right all the time. We all have different personalities and social habits, so as we work together we need to remember those important skills we learned in Kindergarten about playing together.
  
  
• Reliable lines of communication: all team members need to communicate with each other and be available (within reasonable parameters) to each other. You all have different schedules and different responsibilities, and you can’t expect instantaneous response to emails or Facebook posts. However, you should be responsive to communication you have received. A team member should not drop off the map but always be “present” for his or her group in a reasonable timeframe (say no more than one day).
  
  
• Every team needs a leader. Your group will work better if it has someone who is helping to organize and coordinate the efforts of the group. If no one can make a decision, then maybe you need someone to step up and be a leader. I also suggest that you rotate this leadership role by draft: Maybe one person be leader for draft1, another person for draft2, and another person for draft3.
  
  
• Assign clear tasks and deadlines for your group. Then, be sure to communicate with the whole group about your status in completing tasks and reaching deadlines. (The group leader can help in setting these tasks and deadlines.)
  
  
• Being responsible to the group. Slacking or procrastination on individual projects hurts only you, but in a collaborative writing context your actions affect others. It is crucial that you do your part and expect your group members to do their part as well. Being responsible to the group also means helping team members who are struggling for whatever reason. Dividing tasks is part of collaborative writing, but it doesn't mean you give over ownership and responsibility for that part to that single person--everyone is still responsible for all the work of a collaborative writing project.

There are three different kinds of “collaborative writing” (this discussion comes from an article about collaborative writing “Transforming the Group Paper with Collaborative Online Writing” by Peter Kittle and Troy Hicks in Pedagogy Volume 9, Number 3):

Serial writing: In this mode of collaborative writing, a “train of individuals” works on a text (361). This could take the form of employees creating individual sections of a report that the supervisor compiles and sends out without further collaboration. From our perspective, this would be cooperation, not collaboration.

Compiled writing: Here, individuals all add components of the text and retain “some control over part of the final text” so the reader can tell who wrote what (362). This might be a collection of essays or poems. This would be a more advanced form of cooperation, because all the parts have to fit but there is not a great deal of negotiation or collaboration among all the writers that goes into this kind of writing, except for perhaps choosing a theme for the text.

Co-authored writing: in this type of writing, “it is difficult (indeed, often impossible) to distinguish the work of one writer from another” (363). In terms of how we are defining collaboration, this would be a text where all authors have a stake in what is said. There is often one facilitator who coordinates the final draft of the text, but everyone is expected to contribute in the critical and creative ways described previously.

I prefer the term “text-weaving” to describe co-authored writing. Most groups will fall into the easier and more diplomatic approach of serial or compiled writing. “You do that part and I’ll do this part. I have no responsibility for your part and you have none for mine.”

Although you might do earlier drafts with this compiled writing, these separate chunks must only represent the first phase of working on the text together. In a co-authored, text-woven text everyone must be responsible for the entire text; everyone must read, revise, and edit all of the text, and discuss possible changes together--that is collaborative writing.

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