Collaborative writing as defined by Lunsford and Ede (1992) in Singular Texts/Plural Authors: Perspectives on collaborative writing

A key text that has informed my understanding of collaborative writing and the underlying assumptions that surround the term is Singular Texts/Plural Authors:

Perspectives on collaborative writing, by Lunsford and Ede (1992). They co-write the foremost analysis of collaborative writing carried out across a number of professional organisations; however, as mentioned in my caveat above, though their survey is wide-ranging, none of the professions are design based. Their focus is on science (The American Institute of Chemists), social science (the American Psychological Association, the American Consulting Engineers Council), language (the Modern Languages Association and the Society for Technological

Communication) and management (the International City Management Association and the Professional Services Management Association) (1992:8). They address formal written documents such as research papers or reports and they are

interested in the discipline perceptions of writing. They do not speak to designers.

It may be possible to suggest that the assumption here is that though designers collaborate, they do not write, so why would there be a need to assess their writing in this way.

As long-term collaborators, Lunsford and Ede (1992) challenge the assumption that writing is an act carried out in solitude. In order to question this assumption they carried out a three-stage study of collaborative writing as part of the Fund for the Improvement of Post Secondary Education (FIPSE). Their text is presented in the form of a historical background to their own collaborative writing project,

followed by an analysis of the feedback they received through a very detailed set of first round questionnaires sent to a 1,400 members of professional organisations followed by a resulting set of questionnaires sent to 12 members of the

organizations (1992:7). They begin by assessing the parameters of collaboration through their definitions. The text is interspersed with ‘intertexts’ which are quotes, sometimes anecdotal, about a variety of perspectives on and approaches to collaborative writing. Though the text is a report (they show a great deal of data

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through appendicised feedback forms) their obvious interest in the discovery of the subject and the deductive style of the writing makes it a compulsive read. Their text begins by discussing the definition of collaborative writing.

They began their study by researching the notion of collaboration and found that up until the 1920s the main emphasis of any empirical study of groups was on

productivity. Indeed, there had been a gradual increase in the study of the group process itself, which began after the Second World War (Patton & Griffin, 1978 in Lunsford & Ede, 1992:10). Further, they found little research or information on collaborative writing but became aware that pedagogies of the late seventies and early eighties were beginning to call for collaboration in the classroom (1992:9).

However, the style of collaborative learning adopted maintained the assumption that any text based outcome would result in single authorship (1992:9). They noted that few ‘composition’⁴ teachers taught students to collaborate, even though they would be required to do so within their discipline areas (1992:9). Their main findings from this survey of collaborative writing literature relate particularly to the discipline of collaborative scientific writings. Here, there is no focus on the

collaborative writing process, but on the effects of the collaborations particularly on how often the works are cited. This is one way in which scientific impacts are measured. Furthermore, they cite a group of sociologists from the seventies onwards who write disparagingly about their discipline’s tradition of only counting first authors in citation counts: Lindsey (1980:145) states that this is, ‘one of the most serious errors in empirical judgments made in the sociology of science.’ They also give evidence from this period of researchers in sociology and psychology who sought a fairer means of ordering contributors to academic papers. They show that in the discipline areas in which they are seeking to find evidence of the

attitudes towards collaborative writing it is a tricky and much debated standard.

4 This word is not commonly used in the British English education system

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Lunsford and Ede (1992) found the term collaborative writing a tricky one and moved away from it in their questionnaires about the subject preferring to use the term group writing. They prefaced their surveys to participants thusly:

The survey explores the dynamics and demands of group writing in your profession. For the purposes of this survey, writing includes any of the activities that lead to a completed written document. These activities include written and spoken brainstorming, outlining, note-taking,

organizational planning, drafting, revising and editing. Written products include any piece of writing from notes, directions, and forms to reports and published materials. Group writing includes any writing done in collaboration with one or more persons. (1992:14) [Underlining original]

Their aim with this rubric was to encourage the participants to focus on the

possibilities of the writing process, though they were aware of the ‘possible danger of collapsing distinctions between writing and all related intellectual activities’

(1992:14). From this they were able to draw a series of definitions of collaborative writing from their participants. The result of these definitions is that they call for a greater complexity and understanding of ‘what it can mean to write collaboratively’

(1992:16). Many cultural assumptions confine the open declaration of shared ideals through group or collaborative writing but many are situated within academia.

An assessment of whether teams of writers are better than the individual writer is carried out in a paper by Lee Sigelman (2009) that measures the impact of cross-disciplinary collaborative writing on academic papers accepted for a political

science discipline based journal with a 7.5% acceptance rate. Sigelman writes that in general it does not perform differently from single authored papers. However, the multiple “perspectives, skills, and familiarity with research literatures” (2009:512) improves the chances that a paper will be accepted. He concludes, for journals with low acceptance rates “a two- or three-percentage point increase in the

probability of success amounts to a substantial boost.” (2009:512). So, even if the writing on some occasions may appear less than integrated the slight benefits that are offered outweigh the costs. Thus within cross-disciplinary writing declaring the collaborative nature of the writing is useful and it would appear that tools for

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collaborative writing are necessary in developing an open debate across disciplines before any collaborative venture is begun.

Sigelman’s (2009) evidence would suggest that increasing the number of names on a paper increases its chances of being accepted particularly when working across disciplines. However, Lunsford and Ede (1992) suggest that within discrete disciplines individuals are encouraged to claim authority over the community of writers; thus even where teamwork is encouraged the collaborative aspects of the writing process are ignored and outputs claimed by individuals. As I have stated previously, these assessments are general and though informative, are not made in the area of design, which as I will show, has a requirement for open

collaboration and teamwork.

Lunsford and Ede’s (1992) purpose is to ask how writing can ever be anything other than collaborative and they show this through their own writing experiences and carefully collected evidence. They do not set out to question what writing can or could be; they seek a new appraisal of what writing is; how we define writing, and the assumptions that lead us to engage in an archaic belief that one person is capable of completing the entire writing process alone. This relates to Bohm’s ideas about thought in which he acknowledges, “… individual thought is mostly the result of collaborative thought and of interaction with other people.” (1996:15). This leads me to the design questions: How can a text be made to show its

collaborative construction in a designerly (Cross, 1982) way? And how does collaborative writing relate to designing in teams?

However, my definition of collaborative writing for my designerly mind context reaches wider than simply co-writing as outlined in the already extended territory above. Indeed the prefix ‘co’ contains other workshop and designerly words which must be alluded to as a key part of its meaning. The ‘co’ in my co-writing relates not simply to collaboration, but also to the cooperative and combinatorial

processes of the workshop space (cf Shirky, 2009 in Chapter 5: Framing and

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Staging Methodologies). Thus my ‘co’ is collaborative, cooperative and

combinatorial. It offers connection and connexion: the act of connecting through writing together.