Coauthoring is hard, but teaching it doesn’t have to be: An Argument for Teaching Students How to Coauthor in the First-Year Composition Classroom

“What is much less clear is whether teachers are willing or able to make the next logical and necessary step – to move from such collaboration to collaborative writing. Doing so

challenges…very deep-seated beliefs in radically individual ways of knowing and in the writing pedagogies accompanying such beliefs” (Lunsford and Ede 163).

Introduction

In the 1960s, composition teachers had already introduced collaborative practices to

varying degrees in their classrooms. For example in Teacher, Ashton-Warner co-wrote texts with

students by acting as a scribe in 1963. In 1973, Kenneth Bruffee suggested in "Collaboration as

Learning: Some Practical Models" that collaboration is a learning model that reflects naturally

occurring professional, social, and organizational activities, such as group counseling, protests,

and city planning. John Trimbur in “Consensus and Dissent” emphasized the necessity and value

of consensus, an important skill in the workplace. In "Shared writing: Apprenticeship in Writing"

(1985), literacy scholar M.G. McKenzie used "shared writing," consisting of student invention

and teacher creation of texts with primary school students. Peter Elbow in Writing Without

Teachers (1973) argued for collaborative workshopping during which students read aloud and

receive oral feedback, a method later coined “Elbow grouping.” However, Rhetoric and

Composition scholarship on collaboration peaked in the late 1990s as evidenced by the famous

partnerships of scholars like Lunsford and Ede, Day and Eodice, and Spooner and Yancey.

In the new millennium, these scholarly inquiries in collaboration diminished in

relationship to conversations about the digital. Collaborative scholarship would still come from

its proponents (e.g., Lunsford and Ede and Day and Eodice). However, the discussion of

collaboration ceased to be exclusively about collaboration itself and became attached to

pedagogies about Writing Centers (Corbett; Lunsford and Ede, Writing Together), digital writing

tools (Barton and Klint), or even professional communication programs (Parker). However, in

shifting away from addressing collaboration more directly, the field lost something valuable and

promising: Scholars had yet to explore all the approaches to collaboration in the classroom.

Additionally, we have a more nuanced understanding of collaboration that doesn’t limit it

to a single type of activity. According to James Reither and Douglas Vipond, there are three

different "realms" of collaboration, all of which are connected to "writing as process:"

knowledge-making, workshopping, and coauthoring (856). Knowledge-making collaboration is

when collaborators scaffold off of existing conversations and create a reality through discourse;

for example, composition is a field of study because scholars began talking about the nuanced

ways to teach writing and literacy (Reither and Vipond 860). Knowledge-making collaboration is

a useful tool to understanding the social constructionist idea that pre-existing language and ideas

construct new ones, and in this model collaboration focuses more on the exchange and building

of ideas within a community.

The second realm of collaboration is workshopping. (Throughout this paper, I use

"workshopping" to refer to the realm, not workshopping as the act.1) Workshopping asks

students to review one another's work and make suggestions on their writing. The

implementation of feedback is limited ultimately by the desires of the author. Each student has

her own writing, and each student is the ultimate and single authority over that writing. Common

pedagogical practices such as "peer tutoring" and "peer review," as well as the act of

workshopping, are part of this realm, which has long been a staple of composition practice.

1 For Reither and Vipond, workshopping the “realm” seems to encompass workshopping (Elbow), peer review, and peer tutoring (Bruffee).

Although they call it different names, scholars like Peter Elbow, Ken Macrorie, and Kenneth

Bruffee all argued for workshopping. This is a popular form of collaboration in the classroom.

For example, the method "'Elbow grouping' is, in fact, a widespread phenomenon" (Ede and

Lunsford 113).

The third realm of collaboration is coauthoring described as writers: " draft[ing] a section

and give the disk to the other [writer], who would add, delete, or rewrite-marking changes with

asterisks and return the revised version to the other" (Reither and Vipond 858). This process

continues until the writing is complete, meeting physically one last time to make sentence-level

revisions. They describe a process in which multiple authors share ownership and agency over a

single text. While these three realms of collaboration are all significant components, for the

purposes of this paper I will focus on coauthorship—defined as a multi-writer process of creating

a single document with a single voice whereby each member takes responsibility for the process

and the document. Each member takes responsibility for the entire writing process, and each

member has an equal opportunity to alter the document overall. For example, a group of students

can plan the topic and organization, assign individual writing sections, compile the writing, and

edit freely over each other's work in order to create the single voice; conversely, the students can

write each paragraph together. However, the example would not constitute coauthoring in my

definition if each writer simply pasted their section into a document and never as a group

brainstormed, edited, or revised. I believe teaching this type of collaboration has declined and yet

has much to offer students of composition.

Composition students would benefit from coauthoring texts because it would require

them to work through challenging interpersonal dynamics as part of their academic and

professional preparation, which are often not part of college curricula. Coauthoring texts also

produces better work; respondents of a coauthoring survey by Ede and Lunsford showed that

coauthors found the work to be very and highly productive (62). Coauthoring also reflects the

work students might encounter in their professions, preparing them early for sharing texts. This

is explored more in-depth on page 14.

While the pedagogical benefits are clear, coauthorship is not without its challenges. Much

of the structure and merit system within education focuses on and privileges individual work. I

do not argue that coauthoring should replace single-authored texts; I simply suggest that students

coauthor because it reflects the writing that they encounter in academia and in the workplace. So

first, I will discuss coauthorship's relevance, affordances, and constraints. There are also

logistical challenges associated with coauthoring texts. As such, I will address the pedagogical

and logistical challenges by providing models of coauthorship. This will lead directly into

viewing the digital as a way to do this important work, not the reason for this kind of work, as

well as exploring the kinds of tools that can help educators coauthor in the classroom. Finally, I

will give an implementation section that describes principles for good practice, tips for teaching,

grading, troubleshooting, and assignments.

A Brief History of Coauthorship

Some scholars shifted focus from workshopping to coauthoring after Lunsford and Ede

released "Why Write...Together?" in 1983. This work asked scholars to respond to a set of

questions that aimed at targeting the affordances and differences of coauthorship, which they

define as two or more authors writing a single alphabetical text. However, the emphasis and

definition of coauthorship changes depending on the scholar and its use. Lunsford and Ede

define coauthorship as a material practice (Writing Together 193). Using the same foundation as

Lundsford and Ede’s definition, Deborah Bosley emphasizes the responsibility and alphabetical

writing aspects of coauthorship (6). The responsibility emphasis is an important one because it

implies an ethic that Lunsford and Ede discuss in depth, but neglect in their definition. Yancey

comments that coauthorship must be a long-standing partnership (Day and Eodice 27); does this

would mean that one-time coauthors wouldn’t be “real” coauthors?

Ultimately, Day and Eodice argue that the term "coauthor" is largely contested and that

creating a narrow definition might be detrimental: "If they [people who call themselves

coauthors] are not 'allowed' to appropriate the term co-author because we have circumscribed or

quantified the theoretical construct around collaborative writing, we break the chain, cut off the

discourse" (24). Similarly, Lunsford and Ede argue that the definition of collaboration should be

based on prior knowledge, culture, and its growing, shifting complexity and nature (Writing

Together 71). It is useful to sidestep this theoretical minefield because it is simply practical to

do; if the definition encompasses everything, the definition is useless. For the purposes of this

paper, I narrow the definition to the collaborative process of creating a single document with

multiple writer and editor contributors.

Kathleen Blake Yancey and Michael Spooner’s work help to demonstrate the definition

of coauthorship I argue for. In their first two articles “A Single Good Mind: Collaboration,

Cooperation, and the Writing Self” and “Postings on a Genre of Email,” Yancey and Spooner

each take a different font and dialogue in the writing to create a meaningful piece. These articles

keep their voices intact through font and dialogue. However, their third publication, written

under the pseudonym of Myka Vielstimmig, blends their individual voices, effectively creating a

new unique voice. I think the ability to craft one voice is important for students to learn.

Even now, there is resistance to coauthoring with a single voice. Some scholars now

seem to refer to “group work” as something akin to coauthoring, such as Anthony Atkins and

coauthors Michelle D. Trim and Megan Lynn Isaac in Writing Spaces: Readings on Writing. For

example, Atkins offers step-by-step methods of using digital collaborative tools as a way to do

group work. His ideas for execution differ from the ones in this document. His article does not

embrace the open nature of coauthorship; even in his wiki example, the author and reviewer are

distinctly segregated in their functions. In this example, the coauthoring approach of Yancey and

Spooner’s first two articles apply; however, there’s a distinct lack of agency and unified voice. In

Atkins’ model, students are only allowed to give “helpful feedback and ideas as needed”

(emphasis mine, 240), barring any written contributions. There is no single voice in the

document because students do not have the ability to edit each other’s work. Instead, the

document is a conglomerate of students voices sewn loosely together. Classifying the roles of

consumer and producer/review as distinctly separate removes two valuable aspects of

coauthorship: to have equal agency in the writing and editing all of a project’s parts as well as

the opportunity to learn how to negotiate meaning inside a team.

While the history and definitions of collaboration are important to understanding

coauthorship, Lunsford and Ede also give scholars a tri-part theoretical framework to consider:

the cultural value of the single author, the social context in which the writing occurs, and ethical

issues that arise when you ask two or more people to take credit for work (Writing Together 69).

Demonstrating its relevance and importance, this framework is also present, to some extent, in

(First Person)², another landmark work in coauthoring scholarship. The following subsections

aim to introduce the obstacles to coauthoring on a theoretical basis. Obstacles in the practice of

coauthoring will be detailed later.

The Single Author

Even in 2015, the field holds on to traditional, romantic notions of authorship in practice

—the single author struggles alone in a dark room, preferably with a strong beverage and a

deeper understanding of the human condition. The Author generates completely new and

compelling ideas with help from no one. In "Rhetoric, Feminism, and the Politics of Textual

Ownership," Andrea Lunsford argues that this Author, with an implied ownership, is historically

white and male (531). Day and Eodice see coauthoring as a feminist practice (41), a subversion

of the all-knowing, all-seeing white male Author. Maximizing the potential of coauthoring work

and the ideal of the single Author are mutually exclusive, so it’s important to examine the ways

in which the latter might prevent compositionists from subscribing to coauthoring.

Compositionists underwrite the single, original, genius author ideal in two ways: scholarly work

and the composition classroom, which is detailed under Social Context.

In English studies scholarship, we overwhelmingly, openly, and aggressively value single

authorship. The single-author value system exhibits itself in two observable ways: promotion and

publication. Teachers seeking promotion encounter prejudice against coauthorship: “…almost

one-third of all departments surveyed (32.9%) progress toward completion of a second book for

tenure [in 2011]. This expectation is even higher in doctorate-granting institutions…49.8%”

(Lunsford and Ede 190). The influence of the ideal single author appears in other ways for

academics as well. With the vast research and supposed widespread acceptance of collaborative

practices, including authorship, one might assume that coauthorship would make a greater

appearance in scholarly publications, but, largely, it has not. A quick inventory of some of the

field's cornerstone journals shows that rhetoric and composition overwhelmingly values single-

authorship. In the last two years, College Composition and Communication (CCC) published

only 14.3% coauthored articles, including articles listed as co-editors; broken down, that's 84

articles single-authored versus 14 coauthored articles since the beginning of 2013. College

English similarly published only 23 coauthored articles (23%) versus 77 single-authored articles

(77%) from 2012 until the present issue. Since 2012, Computers and Composition published 29

coauthored (28.7% ) versus 72 single-author articles (71.3%). See the chart below. Theoretically,

a journal born into a "post-single author" hierarchy would have a higher rate of coauthorship, but

even the younger rhetoric journal Present Tense has only published 7 coauthored articles since

2010.

Some scholars in Rhetoric and Composition act as if the genius is dead, implying that our

work with collaboration, its push to fruition, and the research of its naturally occurring existence

is over. However, even the most collaboratively-natured journal that academics study,

Computers and

Composition, is

heavily single-

authored. Scholars

cannot remain blind

to the influence of the genius, single author on the work we produce as well as the work we

facilitate with students.

Yancey and Spooner state that:

"composition teachers and scholars are promoting collaboration inside the classroom and

out, our academic institutional structures continue to punish it as a dishonorable 'giving

or receiving help.' Our ways of handing out grades, or promotion and tenure, are not

informed by our best thinking on writerly collaboration." (46)

Yancey and Spooner argue that the classroom, where workshopping collaboration flourishes,

and academic systems do not inform one another. However, it’s unlikely that this professional

value system has no effect on how composition teachers understand and conduct their writing

classrooms. Therefore, in order to teach coauthoring, scholars need to change their own

professional practices as well as examine their own assumptions of what constitutes "real"

authorship. In reality, this author ideal provides foundation for the social context of writing and

performance in the university.

Social Context

Lunsford and Ede see the social context of the writing as important because it places

constraints on the writer(s) such as the ideal author, detailed above, or "the influence of

established institutional review procedures" (Writing Together 69). The social context of student

writing at the university, at least in the English department, is one that promotes the single

author, despite a level of collaboration that Yancey and Spooner suggest. Traditional

assignments in the first-year writing classroom include personal narratives, research papers,

analyses, and the like; these genres, historically, are reserved for single-authors, particularly the

personal narrative. Writing instructors, then, ask students to compose in genres for which they

alone will receive credit. The education system, as a whole, is predicated on individual ability

and success. For example, Day and Eodice, as students, attempted to coauthor a dissertation.

Administration barred them from doing so because their coauthoring subverted and challenged

the views of what constituted "real" work. And while plagiarism is different from the work of

collaboration, the insistence of plagiarism-checking tools promote single-author texts; for

instance, this would deter students from both coauthoring and submitting a draft they

collaboratively wrote. This becomes especially apparent when programs promote process

pedagogy (attached to workshopping), but their raison d'être is that it can help to deter

plagiarism.

Another social context that surrounds students is the writing culture(s) outside of the

classroom, such as writing in digital spaces (sciences and professional spaces will be explored

more fully in The Value of Coauthoring section). While this digital social context isn't

necessarily present in the classroom itself, writing in digital spaces is an experience that most

students bring to the classroom. Therefore, it is important to examine the culture and contexts

that influence digital writing. Henry Jenkins aptly describes the social context of the Internet

with the term “convergence culture,” which he says is the blending of “media convergence,

participatory culture, and collective intelligence” (2). In this culture, users are “hypersocial” and

the line between producer and consumer is erased. “Participatory culture [is when] fans and

other consumers are invited to actively participate in the creation and circulation of new texts”

(Jenkins 331). Users are productive--theory crafting, wiki building, website organizing, for

example; they coauthor (Jenkins 110). Inside the classroom, students are not encouraged to be

simultaneous consumers and producers of text; they are not asked to coauthor papers. Writing

inside of the classroom and writing outside of the classroom, then, is a dichotomy that teachers

must reconcile.

Since coauthoring is largely "reserved" for professional communication programs and the

sciences, English departments don't tend to teach it; instead, they ask students to use

workshopping. The separation of workshopping and coauthoring (re)creates the idea that certain

collaboration is okay and that certain collaboration is not. It tells students that coauthoring is

wrong when, in fact, it is practiced in the work force and other disciplines regularly.

Ethical Issues

Some ethical issues of coauthorship are the same as collaboration, more broadly. For

example, will coauthorship encourage groupthink and forced consensus? Trimbur's discussion of

consensus illuminated an important and vital point of collaboration, particularly in coauthorship:

Consensus might imply silencing student voices. This might be true when students operate under

the misconception that consensus equates not debating the issue at hand. Day and Eodice also

argue that while consensus is a necessary outcome of coauthorship, or collaboration more

generally, "successful coauthoring invites voice that might never have been heard at all

otherwise" (35). It is important, then, to teach students how to engage in healthy and productive

conversations with their coauthors in order to avoid silencing. Day and Eodice argue that a

necessary component of successful coauthoring is respect (34); this is the core issue of a second

ethical problem.

Teachers fear that coauthoring will encourage students to take advantage of one another.

Bruffee suggests that a vital component to successful collaborative work is the agency to form or

reform their own groups. Their experience showed that students tend to organize themselves by

ability and work ethic, forming loyal groups (Bruffee 637-638). When allowing students to pick

their own groups, students are less likely to take advantage of a group member they feel

responsible or loyal to. Teachers can also implement measures, such as anonymous peer review,

to prevent less-motivated students from avoiding any work. However, peer review might disturb

the group cohesion. Another option is to require students to compose a process memo that

describes their influence on the project, what parts they contributed to, etc. If students do the

work digitally, some tools allow the users with access to see all revisions since the conception of

the document. Implementing simple checks might seem cumbersome to some, but reflective

writing is both meaning-making for the student and telling for the instructor.

Ethical issues, as such these, are present in the work of coauthoring, but it is important to

remember that these shouldn't prevent educators from pursuing the work because the benefits

greatly outweigh the constraints and ethical questions. I remind the reader that I do not wish to

replace single authorship in the classroom. I only suggest supplementing instruction with

coauthoring. Lunsford’s research showed that collaboration, in fact, promoted higher

achievement, improved critical thinking skills, and excellence (360). The student can apply these

skills to their solo writing. The benefits of coauthoring research are discussed more thoroughly in

the following section.

The Value of Coauthoring

Coauthoring has very real applications in the real world: In 1990, 87% of 530 survey

respondents reported that they coauthored texts in their profession (Lunsford and Ede 73).

Downs and Wardle argue that composition instructors should be “teaching about writing” more

broadly than the university (553), suggesting that the “bigger picture” of FYC is to teach students

to write for their lives—for themselves, for each other, for fun, for their jobs—not just for the

university. Workshopping teaches students about writing, but as previously mentioned, it can

reinforce the single-author—the Author—ideal. Coauthoring can help to directly displace this

Author. This displacement is important because individual voices can become blurred when

producing on behalf of a department or larger entity, such as a business.

In the workplace, employees must learn to perform in the voice of the company. For

example, a team could be responsible for a budget report; they must write a cohesive document

as well as use the language typical to in-house documents and other budget reports. This team

might not be a group of writers but, instead, a group of financial advisors. Practicing coauthoring

in the university allows students a safe space for learning how to do this writing as well as

learning how to work within a team.

Similarly, the sciences almost exclusively coauthor papers. In complete contrast to

English, single authorship is suspect. The sciences believe that more authors and more diversity

creates better quality writing and results. This is because someone in biology can understand

certain aspects of a project that a chemist does not. They collaborate in order to improve the

product. Also, their individual expertise can add ethos to the project and increase its circulation.

Similarly to these examples, Lunsford and Ede’s coauthoring survey also reflected a wide range

of careers, not just writing professions. In other words, coauthoring is relevant to many fields and

careers, thus a wide variety of students need introduction to this approach to writing. In the

remainder of the section, I outline the benefits and the constraints of coauthoring.

Benefits

Coauthoring, as well as collaboration more broadly, are highly beneficial to students. In

this section, I will outline benefits of collaboration more broadly, then move into coauthoring’s

specific benefits. Next, I will look at the benefits of coauthoring outside of writing as well as

inside.

Looking at collaboration broadly, during her independent research, Lunsford determined

seven beneficial aspects of collaboration. These include problem solving, transfer, better and

deeper critical thinking, “deeper understanding of others,” “higher achievement,” promotes

excellence,” “active learning [...] reading, talking, writing, thinking; it provides practice in both

synthetic and analytic skills” (Lunsford and Ede 360). Coauthorship is one form of collaboration,

so these concepts apply. However, coauthorship can achieve these things in ways the

workshopping can’t, particularly for active learning. For example, two students must be engaged

with each other a lot more if they are coauthoring. They must consult one another during more

than one stage of the writing process. Workshopping can be a single time where a student helps

another student.

Some respondents found coauthoring difficult, but they believed the advantages to be

equalizing. Respondents reported "checks and balances"; "joint knowledge, experience, and

writing expertise; a variety of approaches and ideas; the strengths of all the members; different

perspectives that generate better ideas for a better product" (Ede and Lunsford 62). In essence,

respondents found the writing better both in terms of process and product. Contributing students

have a variety of knowledges, cultural backgrounds, and writing skills; this allows for students to

think more critically about what is most effective in the writing as well as anticipating and

appealing to a variety of audiences. Similarly, Day and Eodice also found that coauthoring

produces better work (75).

In her article titled "Identity, Authority, and Learning to Write in New Workplaces,"

Elizabeth Wardle argues that using collaboration in the classroom not only teaches students how

to collaborate, but it also teaches them how to "learn[...] to write in and for new situations and

workplaces [that are] complex in ways that go far beyond texts and cognitive abilities." Wardle

points out that students need to learn to see themselves and their work as a part of a larger entity.

While Wardle didn't speak directly about coauthorship, coauthoring texts can facilitate this better

than workshopping can because of the need to schedule, make deadlines, hold meetings,

brainstorm, etc. Because students are responsible to someone other than themselves, they have

greater responsibility in and for the writing. While coauthoring, students learn about important

professional concepts as well as writing.

Coauthorship assignments also help to teach rhetorical awareness, which meets WPA

outcomes: “rhetorical knowledge by negotiating purpose, audience, context, and conventions as

they compose a variety of texts for different situations” (“WPA Outcomes”). Traditional paper

assignments undoubtedly teach rhetorical awareness, and I do not suggest otherwise. However,

writing inside the classroom is often taught with assignments that lack exigence, kairos, and

purpose. Elizabeth Wardle identifies these traditional paper assignments as “mutt genres”—

classroom-exclusive writing genres that don’t reflect writing that students do outside of the

classroom. These are genres of writing created exclusively for, and only appear in, the classroom

(Wardle 777). Coauthored assignments tend to reflect "real world" exigences and audiences; they

have purpose and defined rhetorical situations. An example of this would be creating a wiki that

houses all definitions, concepts, and writing/reading tips learned throughout a freshman

composition course or creating a viral campaign to expose a social issue.

Coauthoring isn’t a traditional way to teach process and reflection; however, coauthoring

can help our students to look at their own process, the process of others, and the process of the

assignment at hand, which meets another WPA outcome. Our students may start to ask questions

about the process of coauthoring. How do we do this? How do we start? What kinds of planning

and meeting do we need to do in order to complete the assignment? This can be a powerful

lesson simply because it draws attention to process without having to ask students directly to

think about it. The attention to group process also gives students a chance to reflect on their own

individual writing process and how to negotiate their process with others. Teaching students to

coauthor produces an entirely new opportunities and experiences for learning; this certainly

needs to be explored more fully by scholars in the future, as there isn’t a huge amount of

coauthorship research, especially within the classroom.

Constraints

Time is a major constraint of coauthoring. When do instructors fit it into the already

packed cirricula? A lack of students' familiarity with coauthoring texts may require teachers to

teach good practices, taking up more class time as well. Additionally, the work of coauthoring

itself takes more time, perhaps, than single-authored texts. Consensus, again, is the issue here:

Students may need to take more time to agree on the subject, divide the workload, write, revise,

edit, and hammer out small details. This simply requires students to become more professional

earlier in their college careers, perhaps another issue altogether.

Teachers may also experience resistance from students in several ways. They might

perceive working in groups as a burden, not an opportunity. Students may also experience "a loss

of personal satisfaction" in the making of texts (Ede and Lunsford 62). While students may lose

some stake in the writing, they may find greater personal satisfaction in a group dynamic.

However, this can easily unravel if students do not act as a team, another point of resistance.

Finally, coauthoring isn’t easy work, and in many ways, it is more difficult than single-

authoring; however, 59% respondents of Lunsford and Ede’s coauthoring survey reported

coauthorship/group writing to be either productive (45%) or very productive (14%) (Lunsford

and Ede 74). So while coauthoring may be difficult, many find it rewarding and productive.

But perhaps the most important constraint was analog technology. Coauthoring in the 60s

might have looked something like this: a student handwrites a section of a text and hand-delivers

it to a coauthor, who then edits and adds to the text. Alternatively, these coauthors could meet in

person and handwrite each paragraph, each sentence, together. In 2015, this is no longer a

constraint, moving us forward to discuss the modern affordances of technology in fostering

efficient coauthorship.

Digital Affordances

Current technologies enable and encourage a kind of coauthoring that wasn’t possible

when scholars were writing a lot about it within the last two decades. The online tools didn’t

exist and analog work is difficult, as it potentially requires the coauthors to be in the same place

for an extended period of time. Reither and Vipond mention using word processing technology

to facilitate coauthoring, and even that technology has improved with the track changes function,

which has the ability to comment, to mark up, and to see which user contributes what.

Asking students to coauthor in the space that they will likely see coauthored documents

—digital spaces—requires students to use digital tools to ease the process of learning; in doing

so, FYC instructors have provided students another chance to learn. The instructor addresses a

concern in the WPA outcomes introduction: students should know how to and feel comfortable

in responding to and changing as a result of “the technologies available to them” (“WPA

Outcomes”). A coauthored assignment can lead to candid discussions about the effect of

technology on writing practices. Students can see the technology more clearly if it’s unfamiliar

allowing them to make insightful discoveries about writing processes in general. Synchronous

and asynchronous technologies exist that make the work of coauthoring a lot simpler, quicker,

and easier to do. This section will explore a few digital tools that provide both synchronous and

asynchronous methods of coauthoring.

PBworks

PBworks is a free wiki space. Wikis are heavily intertextual spaces written by everyone

and owned by none. The texts inside continuously change and grow. This is a form of

asynchronous technology; however, students can save material frequently, allowing for other

students to edit and revise over that text sooner rather than later. PBworks also has settings that

allow the administrator to see all contributions from all contributors. This can help deter less-

involved students.

Google Docs

Google Docs is a part of Google Drive, a free online cloud resource. Google Docs is

similar to Microsoft Word, yet the document saves and exists online. This means that it is

accessible from anywhere, at any time. Also, Google Docs is a synchronous technology,

allowing students to write, edit, and revise simultaneously. Similar to PBworks, Google Docs has

a revision tab that allows anyone that has access to the document to see all changes throughout

the life of the document.

Microsoft Word

While offline word-processing technology has existed for some time, Microsoft Word

now has a “Track Changes” function, which can greatly facilitate the coauthoring process. The

“Track Changes” function allows the user to see all edits made to a document. However, this

asynchronous technology doesn’t archive changes after they are manually accepted or rejected.

Unlike the other two, this programming is not free and can cost each student $140 if their

university does not have discounted rates or school computers.

Tips for Implementation

In order for the coauthoring experience to be a beneficial one, instructors must keep in

mind a few principles for good practice:

● Encourage a highly reflective writing process, and assess them on it.

● The assignments should reflect work that is done outside the classroom and should have

an exigence other than learning to write. This might include Wikis, websites, social

media, proposals, or newsletters.

● Pair your students with real clients (even if the client is the student or student

organization) or real rhetorical situations.

● Select the groups yourself originally, then let them move around and settle into their own

groups.

Sample Assignments

In her discussion of mutt genres and improving the types of writing that students are

producing in the classroom, Wardle argues that assignments should be very genre and exigence

focused (“Mutt Genres” 768). I wanted to focus on this principle in the following assignment that

I crafted; I do not claim that this is the best coauthoring assignment, but it can serve as a

generative space and a starting point for teachers.

Coauthoring Re-Vision: An Introduction to the Value of Coauthorship Assignment

The purpose of this assignment would be to introduce coauthorship and its value by

attaching it to the writing and peer-review collaboration that they are a little more accustomed to.

Assign students one of five sample student papers; make sure that the groups are even. In a class

of more than 20-22 students, provide more sample student papers. Ask the students to work on

revising their assigned paper alone; they should not try to figure out which of their classmates

has the same assignment. Their experience revising that paper should be uninfluenced by the

other students to the greatest possible degree.

Ask your students to radically revise some aspects of their respective paper. Have several

ideas in mind that need improvement; for example, you might ask students who are revising

Option #1 to focus on organization and transitions in order to strengthen the paper’s argument.

For another, you might ask students to strengthen the argument by changing the content, adding

or subtracting evidence, adding research etc.

After revising, introduce students who were assigned the same paper and call them

collaborators—coauthors (introduce the language early). Ask students to compare the changes

they made and explain why they made their choices. Perhaps, the students, hearing an idea from

another student, will want to brainstorm additional ideas. After the students talk about what they

liked from each, ask your students to consider how different authors see, read, and review

documents differently. Are some authors better at certain tasks than others? What strengths did

each coauthor bring to the table? What is the value in having different students do the same work

and comparing results? What did you learn in the process?

Finally, ask students to coedit (coauthors editing/revising an existing document) the

original document. To achieve this, they must start with the original document and select aspects

of revisions from each of the student’s work in order to strengthen the document to its full

potential. They must also compose a group memo describing the contributing sources and defend

their choices.

Grading

One of the most meaningful ways to grade is through reflective feedback on part of the

individual and their coauthors. This would be a great way to deter students from simply letting

other writers take over the project and/or avoiding the work altogether. For individual

assessment, ask students to rank themselves—from 1 to 5—on their level of participation and

have them name their contributions. Ask the student to give him/herself a grade (while providing

what an A, B, C, etc would be) and explain why. Ask how they can improve in the future and

what they found particularly challenging. Ask what they learned about writing as a result. In

conjunction with the individual assessment, ask each student to rank the participation of the other

students, giving them space for comments. Be sure to tell those students that this information

would be used accordingly, but their identity would never be revealed to other students,

especially if they received a poor review. Additionally, students can be graded together on the

product—on rhetorical awareness, higher order concerns, appropriate use of genre conventions,

etc. The overall grade for the assignment would be a combination of their self-evaluation, their

peers’ reviews, and the project itself, and the breakdown could go anyway that seems fair.

Conclusion

Coauthoring may be hard, but teaching it doesn’t have to be. However, teachers must first

reflect on what their ideas of authoring are and how limiting they may or may not be. Only then

can teachers begin to truly engage with coauthoring, both in their own practices and in the

classroom. Teachers can use a number of online tools to help themselves and their students

coauthor. The short list of digital technologies are by no means the only tools that facilitate

coauthoring; however they are some of the most popular. Asking students to produce for a

purpose other than for assessment engages them in writing more meaningfully than writing

without purpose, such as mutt genres. After teachers begin to implement coauthoring in the

classroom on a wider scale, the next step in coauthoring research is to perform quantitative

research of student coauthors in the FYC classroom.

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