Although you will find yourself working together with many people on or off campus, your most immediate collaborators will probably be the members of your writing class. You can learn a great deal by comparing ideas with these classmates and by using them as a first audience for your writing (4b). As you talk and write, you will find the ideas they contribute making their way into your writing, and your ideas into theirs. In short, the texts you write are shaped in part by conversations with others. This exchange is one reason citing sources and help from others is so important (see Chapter 14).

In online communication, especially, the roles of “writer” and “reader” and “text” are often interchangeable, as readers become writers and then readers again, and texts constantly change as multiple voices contribute to them. A blog post, for example, may carry with it a long discussion in the comments section that has accumulated as people have replied to one another. Or a document being drafted in Google Drive or another software program designed to facilitate collaboration will carry the voices of multiple authors. These examples paint a portrait of how meaning is made collaboratively.

Talking the Talk: Collaborating or cheating?