Teamwork and Collaborative Writing

Completing the Project

Try to schedule as many reviews of your team's written work as possible. Communicate, meet regularly, and read each other's work as often as possible. You can meet to discuss each other's rough drafts of individual sections as well as rough drafts of the complete paper.

A critical stage in team-writing a paper comes when you put together those individual sections written by different team members into one complete draft. Then, you will probably see how different each section's tone, treatment, and style is. You must, as a group, find a way to revise and edit the complete rough draft that will make it read consistently so that it will not be so obviously written by three or four different people.

When you complete reviewing and revising, it is time for the finish-up work to get the draft ready to hand in. That work is the same as it would be if you were writing the paper on your own, only in this case, the workload can be divided among the group.