Collaborative writing

The term collaborative writing refers to projects where written works are created by multiple people together (collaboratively) rather than individually. Some projects are overseen by an editor or editorial team, but many grow without any oversight. Collaborative writing is also an approach for teaching novice authors to write.

In a true collaborative environment, each contributor has an almost equal ability to add, edit, and remove text. The writing process becomes a recursive task, where each change prompts others to make more changes. It is easier to do if the group has a specific end goal in mind and harder if a goal is absent or vague.

Using collaborative writing tools can provide substantial advantages to projects ranging from increased user commitment to easier, more effective and efficient work processes.

It is often the case that when users can directly contribute to an effort and feel that they've made a difference, they become more involved with and attached to the outcome of the project. The users then feel more comfortable contributing time, effort, and personal pride into the final product, resulting in a better final outcome.

In addition, collaborative writing tools have made it easier to design better work processes. These tools provide ways to monitor what users are contributing and when they contribute so managers can quickly verify that assigned work is being completed. Since these tools typically provide revision tracking, it has also made data sharing simpler. Users won't have to keep track of what version is the current working revision since the software has automated that.

Furthermore, because this software typically provides ways for users to chat in real time, projects can be completed faster because users don't have to wait for other users to respond by asynchronous means like email.

Another advantage is that since this software makes it easy for users to contribute from anywhere in the world, projects can benefit from the inclusion of perspectives from people all around the world.

Collaborative writing has been the subject of academic research and business for over two decades. A number of authors have written on the subject, and each have slightly different views on the strategies for collaborative writing.

According to Lowry et al., there are five collaborative writing strategies:

Onrubia and Engel also proposed five main strategies for collaborative elaboration of written products:

Ritchie and Rigano described three types of co-authoring used in the academic setting:

There are several of degrees of collaboration in authoring. At one end of the range is a single author who through discussion with and review by colleagues produces a document. The other end of the spectrum is a group of writers who jointly author a document. The article by Lowry et al. identified five coordination strategies for group writing: single-author writing, sequential single writing, parallel writing, reactive writing and mixed mode. Each strategy has inherent advantages and disadvantages. For each methodology, the key issue is how the work is divided.

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