Strategies of Collaborative Writing and Intellectual Enrichment.

Journalists often collaborate when they write stories for newspapers, magazines, and journals. Public relations agents and advertising copywriters frequently collaborate in their projects. Increasingly members of industry collaborate in producing written documents. It is important that journalism college professors teach the strategies of collaborative planning and writing. They should give collaborative writing assignments to students while they are still in college so they will be prepared to write collaboratively after they graduate.Current literature about collaborative writing in college is found mainly in journals of business communication and English. More published research is needed about the techniques of teaching collaborative writing in journalism college courses. Some researchers approach the subject from the viewpoint that collaborative writing is intertwined with collaborative learning.HistoryCollaborative learning began to interest American college teachers widely only in the 1980s. Yet the term was coined and the basic idea first developed in the 1950s and 1960s by British secondary school teachers and by a biologist studying British post-graduate education--medical education in particular (Bruffee, 1984).The collaborative forms that interested British educators were described by M. L. J. Abercrombie (1960). The result of her ten years of research on the selection and training of medical students at University College, University of London, suggested that diagnosis, the art of medical judgment and the key element in successful medical practice, is better learned in small groups of students arriving at diagnoses collaboratively than it is learned by students working individually.Abercrombie asked a group of medical students to examine a patient together, discuss the case as a group, and arrive at a diagnosis they could all agree upon. What she found was that students learning diagnosis this way acquired good medical judgment faster than individuals working alone (p. 19).Trimbur (1985) said that the collaborative learning movement emerged in the 1960s when students challenged the university's in loco parentis doctrine, demanded a greater role in determining the scope and intent of their education, and demonstrated suspicion of authority in general. He cites the development of free universities, teach-ins, anti-war study groups, and consciousness-raising groups, all reflecting a felt need for community, self-organization, mutual aid, and nonauthoritarian styles of leadership and decision making.Bruffee said that for American college teachers the roots of collaborative learning do not lie in radical politics or research. He said, "They lie in the nearly desperate response of harried colleges during the early 1970s to a pressing educational need...Faculty and administrators...became aware that, increasingly, students entering college had difficulty doing as well in academic studies as their native ability suggested." Bruffee said that the students had difficulty adapting to the traditional conventions of the college classroom, but responded well to classroom group work (p. 637).Philosophically, the collaborative classroom can be described as a critique of the teacher-centered classroom. In the latter, authority is vested in a teacher who disseminates knowledge to students. In the former, authority is vested in the subject and in the social interaction of the learners (Stewart, 1988, p. 60). However, I am not suggesting that an entire class be taught collaboratively, but rather that collaborative-writing techniques be included in traditional courses such as media writing, reporting, public relations, broadcast writing, public affairs writing, editing, and advertising.Why write collaboratively?Ede and Lunsford (1985) define collaborative writing as the production of a single text by co-authors or group authors. They conducted a research project on collaborative writing under the sponsorship of the Fund for the Improvement of Post-Secondary Education's Shaughnessy Scholars Program. …