Camaraderie and Accountability
Group interactions and experiences create a camaraderie among members that makes the writing process much more enjoyable and memorable as the group learns to respect the
unique qualities and contributions
of their writing partners. Account-
ability is key to developing soli-
darity and common purpose
among group members. Just as
with starting an exercise routine
or a new diet, it is often easier when working with someone else committed to the same goal. By collaborating, we become motivated and committed to improving our writing. Once committed to work with others on a topic, each writer is obligated to present his or her draft of a topic to the other group members by a specific time. But the commitment is greater than just producing a rough draft; there is a certain pride in presenting material to peers even as a draft.
An advantage of the collaborative writing process is that a writing topic, which might be quite long and time-consuming for an individual to complete, becomes quite manageable when divided among the writing team. For example, one topic we have written about collaboratively is writing for compre-hension. For this article, we each chose our favorite strategy to help students improve their reading comprehension through writing; each person reviewed the literature regarding his or her chosen strategy; and finally, we combined the individual strategy descriptions into a comprehensive manuscript on Writing for Comprehension (Wallace, Pearman, Wilson, & Hurst, 2007). So instead of one person writing about a broad topic, the many hands of the group, presenting a multitude of perspectives, strengthened the piece, making the manuscript much more manageable to complete.
When writing collaboratively, the difficulties are primarily two-fold. First, there are logis-tical concerns. Group work means people have to find a common time to meet. Schedules are often hectic and shifting, so it is best when each group member makes the scheduled time of the writing sessions a priority. The group sessions are not successful, indeed not collaborative, if not all members can make the writing sessions. The second difficulty, and the part that teaches us the most about writing and teaching writing, is that the collaborative writers must be willing to accept changes to their writing. There has to be openness among group members to view and see their ideas change and merge into one voice. Collabor-ative writing will not work if a group member is not willing to see his
or her ideas, words,
phrases, and sentences
blended into new lines
representing group
thought and judgment.
Individual writing contri-
butions will be changed
as editing and revisions
occur, and these changes can be difficult for some who may be sensitive to such changes. Yet, compromise and dissension are two facets that are critical to the collaborative writing process. Elbow (1999), a leader in the field of writing, states the goal of collaborative writing is “not just to make collaborative writing easier and more inviting, but also more complex and conflicted. And in the end, the more lasting goal may be to get richer thinking and more voices into solo writing as well” (p. 14). In our opinion, collaborative writing results in a paper in which the sum of all the writers' ideas becomes greater than the individual ideas of each writer.
"The sum of
all the writers'
ideas becomes
than the
individual ideas
of each writer."
greater
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