A Quick Convo All Writing Teams Should Have

Scenario 1: You’re part of a cross-disciplinary group of faculty members working on the new general education requirement. By the end of the semester, your group has to produce a report for your institution’s administration. As you start to generate content, one member’s primary contributions focus on editing for style and mechanics, while the other members are focused on coming to an agreement on the content and recommendations.

Scenario 2: When you’re at the stage of drafting content for a grant, one member of a writing team uses strikethrough to delete a large chunk of text, with no annotation or explanation for the decision. The writing stops as individual participants angrily back channel.

Scenario 3: A team of colleagues decides to draft a vision statement for their unit on campus. They come to the process assuming that everyone has a shared idea about the vision and mission of their department. But when they each contribute a section to the draft, it becomes clear that they are not, in fact, on the same page about how they imagine the future of their unit’s work.

In the best case scenarios, we choose people to write with. People whom we trust, who we know will pull their weight and might even be fun to work with. However, many situations are thrust upon us rather than carefully selected. We have to complete a report, write an important email, articulate a new policy, compose and submit a grant proposal, author a shared memo, etc., with a bunch of folks we would likely not have chosen on our own.

Further, teams of employees tasked with writing are rarely selected because of their ability to write well with others, and many don’t have the language to talk through their preferred composing practices. Across professional writing and within higher education, the inability to work collaboratively on a writing product is the cause of endless strife and inefficiency. How can we learn how to collaborate with people we don’t choose to write with?

Instead of just jumping into the writing task, we argue for a quick conversation about writing before any team authorship even starts. If time is limited, this conversation doesn’t necessarily need to be more than 15 minutes (though devoting 30 minutes might be more effective) depending on the size of the writing team, but it will save you time—and, likely, frustration—in the long run.

Drawing from knowledge in our discipline—writing studies—we offer the following strategies for a guided conversation before starting any joint writing project. The quick convo should serve to surface assumptions about each member’s beliefs about writing, articulate the project’s goal and genre, align expectations, and plan the logistics.

Shouldn’t We Just Use AI for This Kind of Writing?

As generative AI tools increasingly become integrated into the writing process, or even supplant parts of it, why should people write at all? Especially, why should we write together when people can be so troublesome?

Because writing is thinking. Certainly, the final writing product matters—a lot—but the reason getting to the product can be so hard is that writing requires critical thinking around project alignment. Asking AI to do the writing skips the hard planning, thinking and drafting work that will make the action/project/product that the writing addresses more successful.

Further, we do more than just complete a product/document when we write (either alone or together)—we surface shared assumptions, we come together through conversation and we build relationships. A final written product that has a real audience and purpose can be a powerful way to build community, and not just in the sense that it might make writers feel good. An engaged community is important, not just for faculty and staff happiness, but for productivity, for effective project completion and for long-term institutional stability.

Set the Relational Vibe

To get the conversation started, talk to each other: Do real introductions in which participants talk about how they write and what works for them. Talk to yourself: Do a personal gut check, acknowledging any feelings/biases about group members, and commit to being aware of how these personal relationships/feelings might influence how you perceive and accept their contributions. Ideas about authorship, ownership and credit, including emotional investments in one’s own words, are all factors in how people approach writing with others.

Articulate the Project Purpose and Genre

Get on the same page about what the writing should do (purpose) and what form it should take (genre). Often the initial purpose of a writing project is that you’ve been assigned to a task—students may find it funny that so much faculty and staff writing at the university is essentially homework! Just like our students, we have to go beyond the bare minimum of meeting a requirement to find out why that writing product matters, what it responds to and what we want it to accomplish. To help the group come to agreement about form and writing conventions, find some effective examples of the type of project you’re trying to write and talk through what you like about each one.

Align Your Approach

Work to establish a sense of shared authorship—a “we” approach to the work. This is not easy, but it’s important to the success of the product and for the sake of your sanity. Confront style differences and try to come to agreement about not making changes to each other’s writing that don’t necessarily improve the content. There’s always that one person who wants to add “nevertheless” for every transition or write “next” instead of “then”—make peace with not being too picky. Or, agree to let AI come in at the end and talk about the proofreading recommendations from the nonperson writer.

This raises another question: With people increasingly integrating ChatGPT and its ilk into their processes (and Word/Google documents offering AI-assisted authorship tools), how comfortable is each member of the writing team with integrating AI-generated text into a final product?

Talk Through Logistics

Where will collaboration occur? In person, online? Synchronously or asynchronously? In a Google doc, on Zoom, in the office, in a coffee shop? Technologies and timing both influence process, and writers might have different ideas about how and when to write (ideas that might vary based on the tools that your team is going to use).

When will collaboration occur? Set deadlines and agree to stick with them. Be transparent about expectations from and for each member.

How will collaboration occur? In smaller groups/pairs, all together, or completely individually? How will issues be discussed and resolved?

Finally, Some Recommendations on What Not to Do

Don’t:

• Just divvy up the jobs and call it a day. This will often result in a disconnected, confusing and lower-quality final product.
• Take on everything because you’re the only one who can do it. This is almost never true and is a missed opportunity to build capacity among colleagues. Developing new skills is an investment.
• Overextend yourself and then resent your colleagues. This is a surefire path to burnout.
• Sit back and let other folks take over. Don’t be that person.