JAC Volume 12 Issue 1

Collaborative Writing in Industry is a major contribution to the field of technical communication and specifically to the subject of collaborative processes. This newest member of Baywood's Technical Communication Series includes twelve essays divided into four categories: theoretical overviews, case studies, classroom implications, and industrial issues. The editors offer a general introduction to the collection and brief introductions to each section. A selected, annotated bibliography is also provided, itself divided into four categories: collaboration in the workplace, collaboration in the classroom, collaboration and technology, and collaboration and composition theory.

In the opening essay, "Collaborative Writing, Software Development, and the Universe of Collaborative Activity," David Farkas explains why collaborative writing is often difficult: the documents are complex, creating them collaboratively is more complicated than doing them individually, the emotions of writers interfere, opportunities for revision are infinite, collaborators have insufficient terminology with which to discuss their individual visions of a document, and success is unpredictable or immeasurable. Farkas suggests the possibility of gaining insight into collaborative processes from such diverse fields as sports, business, ensemble music, and especially software development. The theoretical perspective is continued in Timothy Weiss's "Bruffee, the Bakhtin Circle, and the Concept of Collaboration." Weiss identifies certain limitations of Kenneth Bruffee's conception of collaboration and cites Bakhtin's division of knowledge and understanding as offering a solid theoretical basis for collaborative communication processes. The writings of Bakhtin are often considered impenetrable, but Weiss synthesizes and elucidates this important work, demonstrating its relevance to business and technical communication.

James Weber's "The Construction of Multi-Authored Texts in One Laboratory Setting" examines the characteristics of the writing environment that influence the coauthoring process, specifically the physical proximity of the authors, their joint perception of a document's goals and content, and the available methods for resolving disagreements and inconsistencies. Weber's essay closes with perceptive and practical recommendations for improving the collaborative process. Similarly, in "Insight and Collaborative Writing," Meg Morgan and Mary Murray investigate how groups arrive at solutions to problems. According to the research they cite, the three conditions for insight are recognition of the problem, confrontation of the problem, and intellectual and emotional involvement of the problem solvers. Failure to achieve insight occurs if sub-groups form within groups, if members violate the norms and expectations of the group, or if the group itself never develops as a group. Morgan and Murray also identify implications of their research for collaborative practices in the classroom or on the job, including the desirability of heterogeneous grouping to achieve multiple perspectives.

Barbara Couture and Jone Rymer's "Discourse Interaction between Writer and Supervisor" is the first of two essays in the collection that emphasize case studies. Based on their survey of over four-hundred professional writers, Couture and Rymer claim that writers on the job interact more often than they coauthor or group-author, especially when document quality is a chief consideration. In three case studies, they explore the types of interactions that writers on the job have with their supervisors, noting curious differences in the perceptions of writers and supervisors. Writers, for example, view the supervisor's editing of their writing as a democratic and informative process that serves to clarify the writing assignment, whereas supervisors consider this editing as a directive and corrective process that teaches the writer what to do or avoid doing on subsequent assignments. Both writers and supervisors focus their interaction on the writer's trial draft, doing little or no collaborative planning prior to drafting.

Equally stimulating is Elizabeth Malone's "Facilitating Groups through Selective Participation." Identifying five phases of collaborative activity (defining the problem, creating criteria, generating possible solutions, evaluating solutions, and codifying the solution), Malone explains that each individual within a group adopts a certain role in relation to the group, usually at its first meeting. The behaviors resulting from this adopted role can be productive during some phases of the collaborative process, but unproductive during others. Malone illustrates her point using a NASA case: she describes how a decisive leader might interfere with a group's initial exploration of all possible solutions, but later assist the group in evaluating alternatives and determining a feasible solution.

Three essays discuss classroom activities. Elizabeth Tebeaux's "The Shared-Document Collaborative Case Response" illustrates the interactive and interdependent relationship of teaching and research. Using cases to design writing assignments and grouping students homogeneously (men with business experience, men without, women with, women without), Tebeaux discovers that women and experienced men do better than inexperienced men on collaborative writing assignments that require diplomacy and sensitivity. This finding leads Tebeaux to a series of additional research questions about the possible influence of gender and job experience on effective technical communication. It also encourages Tebeaux to recommend the use of homogeneous groups within the classroom as a way to show students how characteristics such as gender and work experience might influence their perceptions of appropriate solutions to problems. In "Collaborative Writing: Courseware and Telecommunications," Ann Hill Duin, Linda Jorn, and Mark DeBower describe the design and implementation of collaborative writing courseware operating on a local computer network at the University of Minnesota. Evaluation of the collaborative classroom activity leads the teachers to investigate a series of research issues: the collaborative strategies and processes of students, the impact of computers on the collaborative process, the influence of collaboration on the quality of subsequent documents, and the attitude of students toward the courseware and the technology.

William Van Pelt and Alice Gillam's "Peer Collaboration and the Computer-Assisted Classroom" is the longest and richest essay in the collection, offering a theoretically and pedagogically sound justification of computerized technical writing classrooms. They revise the traditional communication model of sender-message-receiver and propose a collaborative model that recognizes the recursive interaction among writers and readers typical of on-the-job communication. Van Pelt and Gillam also distinguish between team-work collaboration (an individual receiving input from others but retaining responsibility for the document) and shared-document collaboration (a group sharing input with each other and sharing responsibility for the document). On the job, the two types of collaboration are often integrated, and both types contribute to the intellectual maturity of writers, specifically improving their flexibility and receptivity regarding alternative ideas. According to Van Pelt and Gillam's research, computerized classrooms facilitate such collaboration and thus encourage the student's intellectual maturity. In computerized classrooms especially, therefore, collaborative exercises have unique pedagogical merit, introducing students to the environment and practices of professional technical writers while also developing students' intellectual and interpersonal abilities.

The final three essays emphasize collaborative activities that improve the professional writer's productivity. In "Neuro-Linguistic Programming Tools for Collaborative Writers," Dixie Elise Hickman addresses information-gathering techniques. The technical writer's interviewing of subject specialists is here identified as a collaborative activity. In this effective introduction to the communication model of Richard Bandler and John Grinder, Hickman uses numerous examples to show writers how to analyze a subject specialist's language in order to identify information that might be missing or distorted. She also discusses representational systems (the sensory channels through which people perceive and process information; for example, "I hear what you're saying" versus "I see what you're saying") and explains how to identify and adapt to the subject specialist's representational system in order to facilitate information gathering.

Roger Grice's "Verifying Technical Information" identifies and explains the collaborative relationships ordinarily required on the job to verify technical information for its accuracy, completeness, usability, suitability, and quality of presentation and style. Grice describes four major verification activities: editing, reviewing, testing, and involving users. He describes the collaborative processes typical of each verification activity and emphasizes the importance of conducting collaborative verification at all stages of the writing process.

In "Collaborative Editing," Henrietta Nickels Shirk distinguishes between peer editing (editing by organizational equals) and hierarchical editing (editing by organizational superiors). She surveys the frequency of peer editing within the academic setting (a technical writing classroom) and the occurrence of peer and hierarchical editing within the business setting (a variety of organizations). According to the survey, the two types of editing contribute to improved writing and occur with roughly equal frequency on the job. To determine the implications of her findings, Shirk weighs the advantages and disadvantages of peer and hierarchical editing: peer editing leaves responsibility for the document with the writer but offers the writers no consistent or reliable standards, while hierarchical editing offers the writer clear standards but often appropriates the writer's document. Shirk thus recommends a balance of peer and hierarchical editing, identifying three steps to its classroom or office implementation: (1) accepting both types, (2) encouraging both types, and (3) educating editors and writers about the emotional and psychological dimensions of editing.

Together the twelve essays offer a compelling and comprehensive treatment of existing theory and practice, as well as raise important questions and give direction to new research. The only disappointment is that the contributors show no awareness of each other's contributions: there is no cross-referencing or citing of other essays in the collection. The book thus exemplifies the type of collaboration that Van Pelt and Gillam have labeled "team-work collaboration," with each contributor or group of co-contributors interacting exclusively with editors who retain authority over the whole book. This type of collaboration is characteristic of essay collections, of course, and the editors do describe their co-editing process, detailing it at various stages during the book's composition. A collection on collaboration, however, offers a special opportunity for shared-document collaboration. It would be particularly stimulating, for example, to have Morgan and Murray comment on their emphasis on heterogeneous collaborative groups versus Tebeaux's recommendation of homogeneous grouping. Or to give Shirk the opportunity to incorporate Couture and Rymer's findings regarding writer-supervisor editing relationships, or to consider the similarity of hierarchical editing and peer editing to Van Pelt and Gillam's team-work collaboration and shared-document collaboration. Or to ask Weiss to assess Van Pelt and Gillam's theoretical justification of the computerized collaborative classroom. Possibly, the multiple and important interrelationships among the essays in the book are the appropriate subject for a symposium«or a sequel.