Collaborative Writing in Composition Studies

Collaborative Writing in Composition Studies by Fontaine and Hunter discusses the benefits of branching out from writing as simply a solitary activity. They first compare collaborative writing to conversations in a parlor. In these situations, you must listen for the conversations main point after coming in late, say your peace, and leave, but conversation continues without you, just as it began without you. This is parallel to how thinking is changed by the language contexts you enter and how our perspectives influence them (4). Our knowledge is always "under construction," as it is constantly being changed by the ideas that they encounter (8-9). Philosopher Richard Rorty describes this process as social construction (9). According to another philosopher, Mikhail Bakhtin, all of our language is in constant interaction and always has the potential to influence. As a result of this, everything we say is partially ours and partially someone else's (10).
Lunsford and Ede call traditional group projects where students break up the work "hierarchical" as they are each working towards a seperate goal (18). They consider this cooperative, rather than collaborative (19). They believe that holding onto the writer-alone image can only hold people back. We should really be striving for a writer-in-the- world image (21). Writers can scaffold and compliment each other through their collaborating. Though it is no longer an individual voice, they believe true collaboration makes it so that "when the product is so well integrated that it seems to be the creation of one mind" (24), which is the ultimate goal.