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Working with Others on Your Individual Writing Projects

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This book assumes that you will collaborate with others, at least with your instructor and classmates, to write your essays. Class discussion of the readings will help you understand more about the genres you will be writing, and responses to your invention work and to drafts of your essays will give you ideas for writing more effectively.

Collaboration is also built directly into the activities in the writing assignment chapters. In every assignment chapter, four activities ask you to collaborate with other students in a purposeful way. Chapter 6, Arguing a Position, for example, has these activities:

Practicing the Genre: Debating a Position. This activity asks you to get together with a small group of your classmates to practice asserting a position, offering reasons and support for it, and anticipating likely objections to it. Afterward, your group is encouraged to discuss the process, reflecting on what parts presented the biggest challenges, and why.

Make connections. This activity, following each of the professional readings, invites you to examine some of the important ideas and underlying assumptions of the reading. In small-group discussion, you can explore your responses and develop your understanding.

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Test Your Choice. At the point where you need to frame your position, you can get feedback to determine whether your choice will be effective with readers.

Critical Reading Guide. Once you have a draft of your essay, anyone using the Critical Reading Guide can give you a comprehensive evaluation of your work, and you can do likewise for others. Because the Chapter 6 Critical Reading Guide reflects the particular requirements of an essay arguing a position, anyone using it to evaluate your draft will be able to give you focused, relevant advice.

In these four activities, you collaborate with others to develop your individual writing by discovering what you may know about a project before you get very far into it, assessing your progress after a period of initial work, and evaluating your first attempts to draft a complete essay. There are many other occasions for fruitful collaboration in the assignment chapters. For instance, in Chapter 6 you might work with other students to complete the Analyze & Write activities that follow the readings. You and another student might exchange revisions of your essays to help each other with final editing and proofreading. Or you might meet or exchange e-mail messages with two or three other students to work on the Reflecting on the Genre section that concludes the chapter. Working collaboratively on these activities may not only make them easier or more enjoyable but also make them more productive, through the exchange of many more ideas than you might have come up with on your own.

Following are guidelines for successful collaboration on individual writing projects:

Whenever you read someone else’s writing, have the writer inform you about his or her purpose and readers. Collaboration is always more effective when writers focus on helping other writers achieve their purposes for their particular readers. If a writer is explaining a concept to readers who know nothing about it, as might be the case in Chapter 4, Explaining a Concept, your comments are likely to be unhelpful if you assume the essay is addressed to someone who shares your understanding of the concept.
Know the genre the writer is working in. If a writer is proposing a solution to a problem and you are evaluating the writing as though it were an essay arguing a position, your advice is likely to be off the mark.
When you evaluate another writer’s work, be sure you know the stage of its development. Is it a set of tentative notes for a first draft? A partial draft? A complete draft? A revision? If it is a draft, you want to focus on helping the writer develop and organize ideas; if it is a revision, you might focus exclusively on cueing and coherence or editing and proofreading.
When you evaluate someone’s writing, be helpful and supportive but also frank and specific. You do a writing partner no favor if you shrink from criticizing and giving advice. If your criticism seems grounded in the purpose, audience, and genre, it will probably not seem arbitrary or personal to your partner.
Bring as much writing as possible to a scheduled meeting with other writers. The further along your writing is, the more you can learn from the collaboration.
Try to be receptive to criticism. Later, you can decide whether to change your essay, and how.