Online Writing Collaboration Text

Jonathan Friesen - Writing Coach

In english, is professor emeritus of rhetoric and english at armstrong atlantic state university and the author of two grammar and composition textbooks for college freshmen, writing exercises macmillan and passages: a writer 39 s guide st. collaborative writing involves two or more persons working together to produce a written document. Collaborative writing also called group writing is a significant component of work in the business world, and many forms of business writing and technical writing depend on the efforts of collaborative writing teams. Professional interest in collaborative writing, now an important subfield of composition studies. Was spurred by the publication in 1990 of singular texts/plural authors: perspectives on collaborative writing by lisa ede and andrea lunsford. In short, collaborative writing has completely changed the way we work and even the way we think.

As we wrote in a previous post, collaborative writing is a kind of apex learning activity. We’ve worked closely, inhabited physical space together, and have jointly built new virtual spaces. We didn’t really know each other, though, until we started living inside each other’s sentences, paragraphs, and even semi colons. Writing together has fundamentally changed the way we approach the acts of editing, teaching, and thinking. We even brush our teeth differently, sometimes with sean propped on a box atop jesse’s sink for a brainstorming session as jesse’s electric toothbrush whirs away. There are many tools for working collaboratively, and this post is a review of those tools.

But we must point out, here at the start, that the specific tools you use for collaborative writing are less important than how you use them. We’ve used google docs extensively but have just as deftly passed notes back and forth with paper and pencil, our jumbled analog cursors co habiting the space of an 8 ½ by 11 sheet of looseleaf paper. What’s at issue here is a way of thinking a way of processing ideas that’s altogether more vulnerable, letting a virtual flurry of cursors inside our own thinking and writing processes. And three years from now, the tools and how we use them will be just as different.

So, as you play with the various tools outlined here, think not only about what you can use them for but about how they can change the way you work, how their utility can last beyond their own extinction. In theorizing google docs: 10 tips for navigating online collaboration, jesse writes, there is something slightly crazy about a shared writing space, especially when there are more than 2 contributing authors. A google doc can seem to write itself, a new digital ecosphere that bubbles with lively and chaotic energy. Google docs is, quite simply, the most robust and widely adopted tool in this list. But it’s a tool not unlike a wrench, good for a lot of stuff, usable for almost anything, but not tailored well to any one thing in particular. Instead editorially takes one feature of other collaborative writing tools and perfects it: versioning and the ability to push draft copy to one or more editors. The interface is stripped down and lovely, foregoing elaborate formatting for an emphasis on the text itself.

For more, see nathaniel mott’s editorially is the collaborative writing tool we’ve been waiting for . A plugin for wordpress, commentpress allows post publication marginalia on a piece of writing. This tool can be used to collect feedback on your work from a much broader public right within the confines of your own blog. While you can certainly make a google doc public and can even embed one on your own site, commentpress can be used to offer a more fully integrated user experience. Etherpad is an open source writing platform, which has been forked for dozens of iterations, such as piratepad. While not as robust as google docs, or as elegantly designed, the fact that etherpad is open source means that it can be customized to suit the needs of a specific organization or project.

Speaking of open source, development for etherpad is coordinated via github, which is primarily used for the collaborative writing of code. However, github can also be used for text documents, such as this recent e book published by hybrid pedagogy, learner experiences with moocs and open online learning. Although pages is still in beta and so growing in its feature set, it does appear to be the first real competitor for google docs. As is true about most apple products, pages glows with a certain you must refashion your entire life for me charm.

What’s missing at this point, though, is the ability to comment on and chat about a work as it’s in production. What we find so useful about google docs are the layers of conversation that arise around a document as we move back and forth between the text, the comment function, and the chat box. This kind of meta level dialogue, missing so far from pages, has become essential to our process.

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If you find the synchronous aspect of google docs overwhelming or distracting and you’re not alone , this might be the app to try. Whereas google docs encourages a somewhat chaotic dance, the penflip experience is altogether more organized, akin to passing a piece of paper back and forth across a table. While we are both note passers at heart and so enamored of the idea, this is currently not a piece of paper we’d want to pass to anyone. A very simple tool for working with editors or getting feedback from peers on a piece of writing.

Like editorially, draft has a clean interface that keeps the focus on the text itself. Draft does not facilitate co authoring, as much as it attempts to smooth out and enhance the relationship between writers and editors. And the best part: you can shut off your internal editor by using hemingway mode, which basically disables your delete button and allows only one way through to the completion of a piece of writing: forward.

In fact, we wouldn’t even recommend it for writing, since it encourages outlining in a way that is often detrimental to the writing process. Only at the end will you know what you want to say or the words you want to say it with. 14 15 for this reason, we recommend approaching gingko with a certain wonderment. It may not change the way you write, and probably shouldn’t, but how else can it change your workflow. We’ve begun to experiment with it for collaborative brainstorming sessions, to do lists, and meeting notes. Let us know in the comments what you build with this or any of the other tools listed here.

collaborative writing

what is collaborative authoring or writing? one definition is: activities involved in the production of a document by more than one author, then pre draft discussions and arguments as well as post draft analyses and debates are collaborative components.

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1 based on this definition, the collaborative authoring process includes the writing activity as well as group dynamics. Any piece of writing, published or unpublished, ascribed or anonymous, to which more than one person has contributed, whether or not they grasped a pen, tapped a keyboard, or shuffled a mouse. 61 this definition alludes to the complexity of identifying and acknowledging contributions and their contributors.

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With collaborative authoring, there is a meshing of the complexity of technical writing along with the challenges of collaboration. The acts of collaboration and writing as they relate to collaborative authoring include: establishing an agenda or goal of the collaboration effort, identifying writing tasks and dividing those tasks among group members, tracking individual idea generation, defining rules for document management, identifying roles for group members, communicating ideas, and managing conflict. Collaborative authoring, therefore, requires effective communication between members of the writing group. The communication requirements of the writing task are: task division, brainstorming, editing, general discussion, and goal setting. Task division relates to assigning tasks and communicating the associated requirements and deadlines. Brainstorming is generating and recording ideas to be used in production of the text.

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Editing involves members indicating their comments about and enhancements for the text. General discussions can include formal team meetings as well as casual, impromptu conversations. Also, goal setting can include establishing the timeliness and activities that relate to task division. Besides facilitating the processes of writing, language and written text are the products of the group as well as the means of communication. When writing, the author many times makes notes or comments about the text within the text itself. Therefore, there is the need to make the distinction between external representation and actual document text.

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