Re: Single voice in collaborative papers (fwd) -Reply (fwd)

[cleveren@garnet.acns.fsu.edu (Carrie Leverenz)]

I agree with Lisa's recommendation to encourage students to exchange and
revise each other's parts of the text as early as possible.  In the
collaborative writing I've done, we usually start by drafting separate parts
but then revise each other's parts and eventually take turns revising the
whole text.  Of course, it helps that I've chosen to collaborate rather than
been required to collaborate and that I choose to collaborate with people
who I feel are peer equals.  In my dissertation research on collaboration,
students generally did not see each other as equal in ability and thus did
not enjoy or trust the collaborative process.  Carrie Leverenz>
>
>---------- Forwarded message ----------
>Date: Tue, 5 Nov 1996 10:10:36 -0800
>From: Lisa Ede <edel@cla.orst.edu>
>Reply-To: "Moderated Writing Center forum." <WCENTR-L@MIZZOU1.MISSOURI.EDU>
>To: Multiple recipients of list WCENTR-L <WCENTR-L@MIZZOU1.MISSOURI.EDU>
>Subject: Re: Single voice in collaborative papers (fwd) -Reply
>
>These are interesting comments about voice and collaboration.  I find
>myself wondering if the issue about voiceless or dull collaborative
>papers doesn't have as much to do with the rhetorical situations in
>which such documents are often written as with the material fact of
>the collaboration.  Students working on a collaborative business
>report, for instance, are constrained by the textual conventions
>characteristic of business writing.  Now we could probably have a
>pretty lively discussion about those conventions--but might not they
>have as much a role in the persona/voice that emerges from the text
>as the fact of collaboration?
>     In the writing class I'm teaching this term, we're spending a
>good deal looking at the social grounding of various
>textual/rhetorical conventions, asking questions like these:  Who
>gets to experiment with texts?  Why?  How can students know when they
>can be "free" to experiment with academic texts, and when it's not
>"safe."  It's been a pretty interesting discussion.
>     I'd also like to address the practical question that originated
>this thread, for I think that there are times when collaborative
>writers do need to develop a unified voice.  Probably the strongest
>advice I give students writing collaboratively is to begin exchanging
>drafts and revising one another's writing IMMEDIATELY.  This
>encourages group ownership of text, and it also works agains the "cut
>and paste" approach to collaboration that students are drawn to.  In
>a few cases that approach can work, but only if the textual
>conventions governing the particular document are very clear--and all
>the students understand them.
>      (Sorry for the long post.)
>Lisa Ede
>edel@cla.orst.edu
>
>
>