Nancy Allen et al. - Collaborative Writing

What Experienced Collaborators Say About Collaborative Writing
Nancy Allen, Dianne Atkinson, Meg Morgan, Teresa Moore, and Craig Snow

Introduction

The article begins by explaining how recent research into writing on the job has uncovered the interesting issue of collaborative writing. There exists very little research focusing specifically on this topic, however. Information about collaborative writing, the authors state, is “fragmentary and unfocused”. The authors then cite studies that allude to collaborative writing in the workplace. These include research by Paul Anderson; Faigley and Miller; Odell; Paradis, Dobrin, and Miller; and several others. The peripheral nature of collaborative writing information in these studies cause the authors to state, “from these studies we gain little in the sense of the details or range of variation in the processes collaborative writers user, few clearly articulated reasons for employing a collaborative effort…and no coherent evaluation of collaboration from the writers themselves.”

The scant research that does exist on the topic of collaborative writing reveals a range of activities in which these writers engage. These include scenarios such as staff-written/supervisor-edited documents, collaborative planning with individual drafting, individual drafting with collaborative revising, and coauthoring, among others.

These many different forms of collaborative writing compel the authors to clarify their definition of the topic. They cite a paper by Wiener, who distinguishes between “group work”, a basically individual effort that is supported by a group, and “collaboration”, in which all group members share responsibility for the final product and must achieve consensus in order to produce it. This is the form of collaboration on which this article chooses to focus.

The article identifies two problems in reviewing the existing research. The collaborative writing process itself is poorly understood, and studies have not focused specifically enough on collaborative situations involving group authorship. For this reason, this study focuses on answering the following questions:

· What kinds of people form collaborative-writing groups and what kinds of tasks do they undertake?
· What are the writing processes used by experienced collaborators?
· What significant group processes emerge in collaborative-writing groups?
· How do experienced collaborators feel about the costs and rewards of collaboration?

Methods

In this section the authors discuss their research methodology, describing the project as “an exploratory study of the experiences of active collaborative writers from the business and professional worlds.” The participants were chosen to represent a wide range of collaborative settings and projects. The authors go on to provide specific demographic data about the subjects. They then discuss the structured interview form that they made use of. This form began by soliciting demographic information about the participants, then when on to ask questions about the membership of the collaborative writing groups that they have been a part of, the roles and contributions made by members, the writing process used, the types of group interaction that took place, and their overall evaluations of the experience as a whole. These questions were asked over the course of a two hour interview.

In the first stage of analysis, transcripts of the participants’ responses were referenced to produce basic demographic profiles of the members and their projects. In the second stage, the participants detailed observations and evaluations were collated.

Research Findings

The authors concede that their small sample size makes the information gleaned from their study incomplete. Demographically, the participants represented a wide variety of collaborative writing tasks, covering many different forms of professional documents. They also note that participants tended to want to talk about projects that they deemed successful, versus failures. The types of groups with which the participants had worked were diverse in nature in that some were made up of members with very different backgrounds and skills, while other groups had very similar membership. Most groups knew the type of document they would be producing and its general format, while others had higher or lower levels of task restriction.

The group writing processes that the participants engaged in always began with collaborative planning activities. This was usually followed by relatively independent research and drafting. Different participants reported different scenarios. Some produced drafts after heavy group planning, then revised based on group discussion. In some groups, everyone produced a draft, and in subsequent meetings members attempted to merge them. In other groups, the members contributed sections based on their specialties. Sometimes group members attempted to write collectively, word-for-word, a practice which often led to frustration.

Most participants reported significant interaction between group members early in the project, usually face-to-face. The article identifies three important aspects of group interaction:

Group as First-Line Audience

The group often served as an initial audience for the piece that they were writing, unconsciously or consciously.

Group Conflict

Conflict seems to be a given with collaborative writing (or as one respondent put it, “collaborative fighting”), but can benefit the process in many ways.

Computer-Aided Interaction

Computer-mediated communication was not nearly as prevalent at the time this article was written as it is now, however, some of the participants in the study had made use of computers to communicate with other collaborators on writing projects. This included both text-based communication, and sharing of drafts.

Decision-making power in the collaborative writing groups was shared in that anyone in the group could contribute suggestions or object to any idea. This power, however, was completely limited to the writing task at hand. There was a great deal of commitment to the process and the group among members.

Most of the groups were structured around group leaders who primarily seemed to serve a coordinating function. However, there were leaderless groups which prove that this is not necessarily a defining feature of collaborative writing.

Most respondents greatly appreciated the benefits of collaboration, finding them well worth the costs of time, energy, and ego. The documents that they produced collaboratively, they rated as “satisfied” or “very satisfied”. The subjects all recommended collaboration.

Discussion

The research results suggest three important points.

Functions of Conflict

The authors present several studies that support their participants’ suggestions that conflict increased group creativity. These include Janis, Weick, Rothenberg, and others. “When the group can tolerate some disharmony and work through divergent opinion to reach a consensus, their work is enhanced,” the authors conclude.

Distinguishing Shared-Document Collaboration

Here, the article presents a new term for describing a certain form of collaborative writing: shared-document collaboration. Such writing must involve production of a shared document, substantive interaction between group members, and shared decision-making power and responsibility.

There are many advantages to forming collaborative writing groups. The authors found that such groups are formed primarily because of the size of the task, the scope of the task, or a desire to merge divergent perspectives.

Questions for Further Research

The authors conclude their article by conceding its exploratory nature, and reiterating that their small sample (many of whom have academic affiliations) can only yield partial results. They also point out that since their subjects chose to speak mainly about successful projects, they have little data regarding failed collaborative writing projects. Future research on this topic could explore the influence of leadership styles, the use of multiple group types and writing processes on a single project, new technologies, and the interaction between organizational hierarchies and the hierarchy of collaborative writing group members. From business to academia, more information on collaborative writing would be immediately useful. The authors hope that they have pointed the way to future research.