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.
Introduction
Collaboration is a necessary task in most workplaces. Collaborative writing is one of the common ways people in the worlds of business, government, science, and technology handle large writing projects. In the professional and scholarly worlds, a lot of time, research, and energy has been devoted to understanding how teams work and how to make them work more effectively. There is an entire industry devoted to assisting companies and organizations to get the most out of teamwork. In your career, you are more than likely to encounter situations where you have to work and write collaboratively. This chapter aims to help you develop the knowledge and skills to work effectively in groups.
Some people dislike group work due to negative past experiences. They may be the person who seems to do more work than others, they may dislike having to rely on another person to follow through, or maybe they feel it was difficult to pull together so many ideas from so many people. Others do not mind it. They may have had positive experiences and see the value in group work. In fact, if done correctly, collaboration can be an effective tool for getting work done.
Thanks to ever-emerging new technologies, writers can collaborate in exciting new ways. Using tools such as Google Docs, writers can work on texts synchronously even when they are separated by continents and oceans. Using discussion forums, musicians can exchange and remix chords with other artists from around the world. Via Skype, writers can talk with one another as they collaborate in a shared white space. And then there is Wikipedia, one of the most successful collaborative writing projects ever conceived and executed. Clearly, good collaboration skills are more important now than ever before.
In our e-culture, being a successful collaborator is crucial to success. Today’s workers use multiple media to share and construct meaning. Today’s workers must be symbol analysts and are especially social in terms of how they communicate and learn.
When the first caveman started doodling on a stone canvas, he probably had colleagues looking over his shoulder, suggesting that he hold the brush a different way, mix the paint differently, perhaps make the buffalo appear fiercer, and so on. Many people find discussions with trusted colleagues to be an invaluable way to develop and polish ideas. Professionals in most disciplines, for example, attend conferences so that they can discuss ideas with colleagues and leading researchers. Writers in business and scientific contexts commonly work in teams with individuals responsible for their areas of expertise, such as marketing language, audience, finance, research, and editing. Some authors do not feel comfortable beginning a new project until they have discussed their ideas with others. Successful writers do not wait until they have completed a project before seeking constructive criticism. Instead, they share early drafts with critics.
This chapter will provide information and resources to help you master collaboration skills.
Source: Michael Beilfuss, https://open.library.okstate.edu/technicalandprofessionalwriting/chapter/chapter-3/#chapter-22-section-1
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