Annotated Bib - Part 1

In my search for literature on collaborative workplace writing, I have found several books and articles which I believe will inform my research project. As I mentioned in my dissonance blog, I am specifically interested in looking at the benefits and drawbacks of using technology to mediate a group-authored text. This blog is my effort to annotate a few of the sources I plan to use in my paper.

Colen, Kerryn and Roslyn Petelin. “Challenges in collaborative writing in the contemporary corporation.” Corporate Communications Vol. 2 (2004): 136-145. ABI/INFORM Global. ProQuest. University of Nevada, Las Vegas, Lied Library. 8 Mar 2008 .

Colen and Petelin present research on collaborative writing in the workplace to highlight the “pervasiveness” (136) of group writing in corporations and demonstrate why employees need to understand the skills required for team authorship. While not making any new arguments themselves, the authors provide solid explanations for the work of researchers like Ede and Lunsford who have looked closely at collaborative processes in various occupations. In doing so, Colen and Petelin predict a future need for studies in the “best practices” (142) for collaborative workplace writing.

I agree with Colen and Petelin’s suggestion that we need to define what the best practices are for collaborative workplace writing. In addition, I believe that one question we need to ask about best practices is whether it is better to work in a face-to-face setting or in a virtual realm when working on group-authored documents. I often wonder how working in one setting affects the benefits that would normally come from collaboration. For instance, the authors mention that one benefit of collaborative writing is that it often develops employees’ “active listening skills” (140). So, what effect might online collaboration have on effective listening and the interaction among authors? They also cite G.A. Cross who feels collaborative writing is often “protracted” (139) when participants are physically separated. This would indicate to me that online collaborative writing might delay a document’s completion. Overall, Colen and Petelin don’t answer these types of questions directly, but they provide me with a good starting point for further sources that might.

Jones, Scott. “From Writers to Information Coordinators: Technology and the Changing Face of Collaboration.” Journal of Business and Technical Communication Vol 4 (2005): 449-467. ABI/INFORM Global. ProQuest. University of Nevada, Las Vegas, Lied Library. 8 Mar 2008 .

Following up on his 1994 research on a company’s collaborative writing practices, Jones returns to the same company to see how the implementation of intranet and e-mail have affected the writing process. Jones first clarifies what he means by collaboration because shared responsibility for a text can take various forms. Using what he calls the “Comprehensive Collaborative Continuum” (451), Jones demonstrates how collaboration can move from the “Contextual” to the “Hierarchical” to the “Group” (451) – each movement becoming more overt in collaborative interaction. Then, Jones applies these forms of collaboration to the company he is studying, showing how e-mail and intranet has impacted the writers.

I found Jones’s conclusion that “changes in technology are creating new types of writers” (464) to be evident in the new responsibilities the company’s writers have. The writers, for example, tended to spend more time manipulating data in an online space versus collaborating on the production of new text. I think one positive aspect of this change is that writers could now template certain information to speed up “document cycling” (464). On the other hand, the company added new positions to the intranet – such as an intranet editor – which slowed down the progress of transmitted documents.

I was a little disappointed that Jones could not find strong indications that the company used group collaboration because this is the area of his continuum in which I am most interested. Jones even admits that more research is needed on group writing to see how technology affects texts and group identity. At the same time, I think Jones’s findings on “hierarchical” collaboration are applicable to certain group processes. One example of this is when Jones states that information stored on the database meant that “writers required much less collaboration with content experts” (459) in content interaction (hierarchical) collaborative writing. This same result could be evident in a group dynamic if the members of a writing team used the intranet to access data from a subject matter expert.