Teamwork and Collaborative Writing
The advantage of teamwork is that everyone brings their own ideas, expertise, and perspectives. Voicing different viewpoints early during the drafting stage allows the group to address potential concerns, clarify misunderstandings, and eliminate problems that may otherwise arise – before you have spent a lot of money on printing costs or before the text reaches your client.
These discussions may seem long and tedious, and frustrating when co-workers disagree. But, others may see red flags you missed and prevent issues from becoming future problems, such as when a customer misunderstands your intent or cannot follow a convoluted set of directions.
Companies involved in large projects written by different people, such as a complex grant proposal, establish clear style guidelines. Hence, the material reads or flows well, follows the same grammatical conventions, and makes a coherent argument or appeal.
When writing work documents, ask if you should include a company logo, template, or boilerplate language. For example, many companies use a carefully-worded paragraph the marketing department created to describe the mission or goals of the organization.
Read this text on how to write with other members of your team.
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.