(CM 1145) Collaborative Writing

Collaborative writing is when you’re in a group with your fellow classmates to create an essay. Each student is assigned something different whether it is the introduction, thesis statement, or conclusion. For me, I was put in a group with three other people and I was assigned the introduction and one supporting paragraph. Once we wrote our parts, we had to send each individual section to our teacher and she then combined it all into an essay. It was our job to edit the essay, so we decided the order in which the edit would go. I was in charge of the third edit and to be honest, it was incredibly difficult. After I was finished editing it, I had to send it to my other classmate who was in charge of the final edit. She then sent it back to our teacher and we received a hard copy of it, and as a group we sat down and went through it line by line, fixing any mistakes.  Once we finished that, someone had to go back and fix the mistakes electronically, and in this case that person was me. It was than my job to send the final copy of our essay to the teacher.

I was excited for this assignment, it seemed like a fun and unique way to combine everybody’s writing styles. After editing the essay, my opinion changed. Everybody has a different way of writing and explaining things, so when it came time to combine four different perspectives into one essay, it was brutal. Some paragraphs were shorter than others and each one was written differently. I would rather write my own essay because than I would be in charge of the entire thing myself. This assignment made me nervous because I had to put faith and trust into my classmates. They had to do their part and do it well; if they didn’t, everybody in the group would pay the price.

I’m not entirely sure what this assignment teaches us. Maybe the point of it was to get students to work together and trust in each other. Perhaps the purpose was to emphasize that everybody has a different and unique writing style and that no style is wrong. I did learn one very important thing though, I learned the definition of team work.