Collaborative Writing in the Workplace

Success and Failure in Collaborative Writing

Ultimately, the success of collaborative workplace writing is determined by the success of the product.  In comparison with the oftentimes individualistic nature of writing (as explored by Murray) that is taught in our education system, employees at companies must adapt to a writing process that has little concern for how one writes, and more for that one does write.  Considering this context, we must ask, how are success and failure determined?  Of course, the answer is by the product, and by whatever standards accompany the specific project.  But in turn, successful collaboration is defined by the success of the product, and a successful collaboration process can define the success of the product.  With this in mind then, our emphasis in this section is on how to make collaboration successful in order to help make the product successful.  We have already considered the environmental aspects that can contribute to successful collaboration, so next we will focus on the collaborative writing process itself.  By looking at the process of collaborative writing, we can consider issues that might come up during the collaborative writing process, and how issues may be resolved with the guidance I present.

 

The Role of Revision

Revision is a key part of writing, and one that is oftentimes underrated.  Debra Myhill calls revision a “cognitively complex task” that is “conscious, not automatized,” (Myhill, 325) highlighting the need to incorporate revision as a manual process.  With this in mind, effort must be put in to revise, and in order to use it in a collaborative environment, it is even more important to be conscious of its application.  This conscious application is necessary because, as Myhill refers to it, revision of the text is a “transformation.” (Myhill, 324)  In other words, a text evolves and improves through revision.  Nancy Sommers, a key contributor to research on revision process, describes the discrepancy between two sides of a case study she performed that is important to resolve when applying principles of revision to a text.  In her study, she reported that student writers (less experienced writers) often saw textual revision as a process “requiring lexical changes but not semantic changes.” (Sommers, 382)  On the other hand, experienced writers recognized “writing as discovery” (Sommers, 387) – which implies that writing is a process of formation of words and knowledge.

 

Perhaps introducing revision at this point in the project may seem strange.  However, I introduce the concept of revision to our discussion on collaborative writing because I believe understanding revision to its fullest extent is absolutely necessary to understanding (and doing!) collaborative writing.  In truly collaborative writing, revision is a near constant process.  When multiple writers work together on a document, there is a constant loop of feedback occurring, reflecting the cyclical process of revision that Sommers describes in her article.  Considering the transformative power of revision paired with the process of writing (which is already filled with power because of its formative abilities) collaborative writers have a new agency over their text to take advantage of.  Part of this agency is that revision has even been connected to problem solving, (Herreman, 7) which is often an essential function of technical documents.  This is at the heart of why collaborative writing is so effective, and furthermore, can be used to understand how to collaborate in writing in the first place.  Ensuring that creating a collaborative text is a constant process of intentional revision is how a successful collaborative text is formed.

 

Encountering Issues in Collaborative Writing
By defining a collaborative text by these terms, it becomes clear that encountering issues in collaborative writing becomes a question of encountering issues in the revision process, in the process of creating and transforming the text.  The documents I have created outline principles based on the research I have compiled in this project, keeping in mind that collaborative writing involves constant revision.