Rebecca Ingalls’ Writing Eyeball to Eyeball offers many incredible examples of successful collaborative writing; however, in my experience, it is not always successful and can be affected by more factors than communication, structure, negotiation, organization, and deadlines. I have encountered instances where different personalities and perspectives impact the writing process and its results.
Thinking about my previous collaborative experiences, I can recall most of them being for a class project – and, on very minimal occasions, personal music composition–. Focusing on my classes’ group projects, I remember for my high school methodology project, we were able to select our own teams, and our topic was selected as a derivate of a list provided by the instructor. For this project, we did not create a contract or make decisions strategically; honestly, we were mostly winging it. We tried dividing the labor evenly; however, it resulted in one of the members working extra to compensate for the missing work. There were many tensions based on the workload of some and the lack of commitment and interest in the project. Ultimately, they were technically not resolved, as I and another group member took upon ourselves the responsibility of doing a quality project. Between us –the ones actually working on the project–we constantly praise each other for our hard work. I, for one, would constantly compliment the writing of my fellow peer, and she would compliment me on my research skills and data collection. We knew our project was ready for presentation once we had completed the list of tasks we needed to accomplish and after many, many revisions from our instructor. Even though I understand how this approach for a group project worked out –as we got an excellent grade–it is not ideal, and Ingall’s pieces of advice are extremely helpful at the time of making an integral project.
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