Determining how you want to approach the writing process as a group is an often overlooked but important key to successful collaborative writing. On the next page is a summary of writing strategies to consider for your retreat writing project, ordered from least to most collaborative.

For each writing strategy, there is typically a ‘writing team lead’, or primary author, who takes on additional responsibilities (see subsequent sections for more details on roles and authorship). The size of the writing icons in the table below represent the writing effort, and thus potential authorship order.

Keep in mind that these strategies are a framework and not rigid in their implementation. You may find you combine different strategies in your collaborative writing approach.

Writing collaboratively with colleagues who share your research or scholarly interests can be one of the great joys of academic life. The benefits of coauthoring are tangible and subtle: we often produce higher quality manuscripts and proposals than we would if writing solo, and writing with others can be so much more fun than writing alone!

Coauthoring a document with others can also be challenging, complete with unexpected delays, content negotiations, and stylistic compromises. Depending on how well we know ourselves and our partners as writers, the process of coauthoing a highly structured, high-quality document can also be highly mystifying at times.

While we cannot demystify all collaborative writing issues here, we can share two pre-strategy steps and a couple resources for your journey.

Determining authorship credit and order in collaborative research projects can be difficult, can introduce or increase conflict in the research environment, and can exacerbate existing inequalities and affect power dynamics between team members. As a result, much disciplinary scholarship has been written to develop potential guidelines for authorship credit and order. However, the collaborative interdisciplinary nature of much SoTL work, along with the increasing focus of SoTL on students as co-inquirers into SoTL research, creates unique issues and challenges in ethically assigning authorship credit on SoTL projects. Informed by seminal disciplinary papers on authorship issues and best practices in undergraduate research, this paper proposes a new model to identify the relative contributions of student collaborators and explicitly incorporate a process-focused approach to collaborative faculty-student SoTL projects.

This article provides a taxonomy of, nomenclature for, and discussion of issues related to collaborative writing. Our goal is to enhance its research, improve its application in academia and industry, and help produce technologies that better support collaborative writing. To write collaboratively and build sup- portive technologies, practitioners and academics need to use a consistent nomenclature and taxonomy of collaborative writing. This article defines key collaborative writing terms and builds a taxonomy, including collaborative writing activities, strategies, control modes, work modes, and roles. This article stresses that effective choices in group awareness, participation, and coordination are critical to successful collaborative writing outcomes, and that these outcomes may be promoted through collaborative writing software, chat software, face-to-face meetings, and group processes.

Discussion Questions

1. Whom among your professional network do you respect and trust to act as critical friends? Which of these people could you approach to comment on drafts of your writing?
2. Which of your critical friends might you consider co-authoring with?
3. How do you give developmental feedback to colleagues, and how can you encourage them to do the same for you?