Collaborative writing practices and writing support technologies

Instructional Science 21:15-28 (1992) 15 © I~uwer Academic Publishers, Dordrecht - - Printed in the Netherlands

Collaborative Writing Practices and Writing Support Technologies

RACHEL RIMMERSHAW

Department of Educational Research, University of Lancaster, Bailrigg, Lancaster LA1 4YL, United Kingdom. Email: [email protected] l

Abstract . This article explores some relationships between collaborative writing practices and writing support technologies. It attempts to illustrate the range of ways in which technologies are used. It examines the relationships of particular technologies and practices with how the writers view the process in which they are engaged. The implications of the findings for thinking about the role of computers in supporting writing, and facilitating collaborative writing in particular, are discussed.

INTRODUCTION

Collaborative writing is a very common practice, but one which has been little researched in Britain. This article is based on a small scale piece of research carried out between October 1989 and December 1990 into collaborative writ ing in the academic context. A much more comprehensive and detailed study of this type would be that of Ede and Lunsford (1990) in the United States. Much could be learned from an examination of their work which is beyond the scope of this article.

Col lab or a t ive Wri t ing as Soc ia l Prac t i ce

Whilst collaboration by s tudents in the process of gaining the i r academic credentials has traditionally been discouraged or even seen as 'cheating', it is a widely seen practice in the world of work, wherever collaborative activities in pursui t of common goals are found. This includes the world of the professional academic as well as the commercial and industrial world. Collaborative writing then, can be seen as a social practice, of which there are var iants with different meanings to their participants.

The te rm collaborative writing i tself does not define a commonly accepted practice or set of practices, as my interviews with academic writers has revealed. In talking to them thei r personal definitions emerged, and were sometimes quite narrowly conceived. For one, 'collaborative writing' denoted two or more people generat ing text together in the same place, and for another it implied get t ing wri t ing pub l i shed with more than one author's name. In order to elicit their experience of as wide as possible a range of collaborative writing practices, I got them to talk about writing outside thei r personal

16 Rachel R i m m e r s h a w

definition of collaboration too, effectively generat ing through the interviews a definition of collaborative writing as:

any piece of writing, published or unpublished, ascribed or anonymous, to which more than one person has contributed, whether or not they grasped a pen, tapped a keyboard, or shuffled a mouse.

As someone at the conference where an earlier version of this article was first delivered as a paper pointed out, most writing is collaborative by this definition. By referring here to her contribution I want both to acknowledge it and to use it as a case in point of how people typically contribute to each others writing even though the collaborative input is not always visible in the final product.

I have been referring to collaborative writing practices, ra ther than to collaborative writing, and this choice of terms is deliberate. A practice is culturally defined. It is a pa t tern of interactions between people and their environment which can be recognised as recurring in a culture. Because different cultures have different activities and artefacts which identify them or are typical of them, an action term such as 'writing' can refer to quite different relationships between the wri ter and other actors and artefacts in the culture. To capture this variety of meanings and relationships, Street (1984) talks not of 'literacy' but of "literacy practices". I shall follow him by talking not of collaborative writing, but of collaborative writing practices. This enables me to recognise tha t some of the features of the writing practices revealed by this research may be unique to the academic context (or to one of its sub-cultures), while others may be shared with practices in other social and inst i tut ional contexts. It was an impor tant reason for asking the in te rv iewees not only about the i r d i f ferent academic wri t ing collaborations, but also about those (if any) which they engage in outside their lives as teachers, researchers or students.

In order to find out more about their writ ing practices, it was necessary to get writers to describe and reflect on part icular writing events; tha t is (following Barton 1991) the particular activities in which writing has a role, as opposed to the general culturally recognisable ways in which it is used - - the practices I was trying to identify.

Practices and Technologies

It is necessary at this point to make clear the distinction I make between practices and technologies. Technologies are used in writing events and practices. They are the means of interpersonal action and of acting on the environment. They do not carry meaning independently of the practices in which they are used. Thus collaborative writing, peer tutoring, and after-dinner speech giving are social practices; email,

Collaborative Writing Practices & Writing Support Technologies 17

conversation, and prompt cards are technologies which might be used by the practitioners.

Some readers might feel they want to give different names to these 'technologies', referr ing to email as a medium, conversat ion as a technique and cards as a technology for example. By using the term 'technology' for them all I want to draw attention to what they have in common; tha t is their function of enabling the meaningful cultural activity in which they are employed. This way of using the term is not unlike that of Ellul (1964) who uses 'technique' in much the same way, and to emphasise the same commonality. His t rans la tor refers to Lasswell's similar definition: "the ensemble of practices by which one uses available resources to achieve values" (Ellul, 1964 p.x).

Lasswell's use of the term practice appears to turn my distinction on its head. This is because one cannot identify something as ei ther a practice or a technology simply by inspecting the word or phrase which describes it. It is possible to use the same term to refer to both a social practice and a technology. For example 'reading aloud' is a set of social practices which have different meanings and assume different role relationships in different social contexts, such as infant pupils reading to their classroom teacher, fathers reading to their children at bedtime, newscasters reading to a TV audience. But it is also a resource or an e lement in the bat tery of technologies which may be drawn on by collaborative writers. It is then seen as one option by which some function of the practice of collaboration is achieved. In the same way collaborative writing itself, may be the technology by which some other practice is often or occasionally realised. In other words practices may themselves be technologies for other practices.

Writing Support Techno l og i e s

It should be clear from the foregoing that in this paper I am deliberately using ' technology' in a very wide sense, to mean not only new information technologies such as email, fax, word-processors and other computer-based technologies, nor even 'old' information technologies of pencil, paper and eraser, the telephone and the postal service, but also any interpersonal communication or representation medium or system. In other words I use 'technology' in its basic sense of 'a means of getting the thing done'. I believe it is important to look at what happens in social practices like collaborative writing with this kind of broad view of writing support technologies in order to be able to tease out what is unique or useful about any particular technology, such as a computer- based one.

INVESTIGATION

Data

The main data on which the study is based are tape-recorded interviews with collaborative writers. At this stage twenty writers who have all

18 Rachel Rimmershaw

done some collaborative writing in the academic world have been interviewed at length. These interviews comprise the main source of data since the primary interest of my collaborative writing research concerns how writers see themselves.

Additional data sources include observation and tape-recordings of collaborations in progress and written reports by collaborators on the production of specific collaboratively written pieces. Any quotations from any of these data sources given in this paper are attr ibuted to invented names which preserve only gender and ethnicity information to protect the ident i ty of both the writers interviewed and their collaborators.

Subjects

The interviewees were all members of the academic community of one kind or another in British Universities. Their disciplinary backgrounds were largely in social sciences, with a wide range of subject disciplines represented, as Table 1 shows.

They included research and teaching staff, including young fieldworkers, research assistants and post-docs, teaching fellows, and tenured lecturing staff including very experienced writers at reader and professorial level, and also undergraduate and post-graduate students. Table 2 indicates the range of their status in the academic world at the time they were interviewed.

Computing 3 Education 4 History 1 Linguistics 5 Philosophy 1 Politics 1 Psychology 3 Sociology 2

Table 1. Discipline of first twenty interviewees


Students (4) undergraduate 2 masters 1 research 1

Researchers (4) research assistants 2 research officers 2

Teachers (6) tutors/teaching fellows 1 lecturers 5

Senior academics (6) senior lecturers 3 readers 2 professors 1

Table 2. Status in the academic world of first 20 interviewees

F o c u s

The writing they talked about was largely, though not exclusively, done in a professional context, and included both published and unpublished writing. These ranged from the production of teaching materials and course handouts , th rough research proposals, research reports , conference papers, journal articles, academic books, text books and 'popularising' books and newspaper articles. Some also talked about non-professional writing such as filling in job applications and tax returns and writing c.v.s and family letters with their partners, writing birthday party invitations with their children, and writing publicity and correspondence with other members of social clubs.

The collaborations include both very brief ones, lasting a few hours or even less, and also very long ones - - four or five years in the case of some books. The larger research study from which this data comes is concerned with the range of collaborative writing practices and what they mean to their participants: why they are involved, how they manage the collaboration and how they deal with issues of identity and power in collaborating. So the focus of the interviews was much wider than the issues to be reported on here, but in telling me about their collaborative writing practices these writers gave me the material to reflect on the significance of the technology they use for collaborating.


FINDINGS

The Range of Practices and Support Technologies

What is immediately noticeable in these data is the diversity of both the collaborative practices and of the technologies which are used to support them. Par t icular technologies are used in quite different ways in different collaborations. In what follows I group my examples under three headings - - writing together, exchanging drafts, and meeting needs and circumstances. These labels identify clusters of practices so they are not co-terminous with Newman and Newman's three modes of collaborative authoring (Newman & Newman 1990), which refer not to the technological dimension of collaborations but their intellectual characteristics. I hope this use of group labels doesn't mask the message that there is a striking variety of practices to be found in each group, even from the evidence of this small sample of twenty or so writers studied.

Writing Together. One pair (husband and wife) often work together at home. Arthur says how important it is for him to have access to the transcribing tool at the moment of text generation:

If Polly and I are ... both working at the word-processor, I'll say "I've got an idea, can I have a go at the keyboard and I'll just t ry out a few lines and then we'll see what we can do with them together" ... you end up that there's something coming if you can get it down, then it doesn't mat ter how bad it is in some ways, at least it's there for both of you to look at.

By contrast Billy describes reserving such 'intense' writing sessions for key sections of synthesis or theoretically difficult material, especially when under time pressure. Sitting together in the office with his junior research colleague (and student) Lucy for a couple of hours they "take turns to dictate sentences, or write aloud", either at the keyboard or on paper, struggling for the appropriate words to "come out". Pencil and paper is as widely used as the word-processor for this kind of simultaneous composition practice. Timothy, a senior academic, reports spending 48 hours with pencil and paper at his collaborator's house during which "we rewrote every sentence together".

Exchanging Drafts. A more common practice than physically writing together was the exchange of drafts by post, email, fax or the exchange of text files on disk. Long distance collaborators have to decide on how to communicate and what parts of their practices to support with which technologies.

For example one pair uses email to bounce ideas off each other on an almost daily basis, whereas another exchange substantial drafts of text at agreed intervals and build up a final version in a continually modified file which is passed to and fro. It may be no coincidence that both partners in the first pair had access to email on their desks, while


in the second case one par tner had to walk some distance to another part of the building to access the network.

Timothy's account of the difference access to email made to his practices in co-editing a journal with an overseas colleague is tha t so far it has made more difference to how they communicate about writing than to how they write. Although he imagines they will swap drafts by email in the future , the immedia te change has been to replace fortnightly telephone discussions with almost daily email exchanges. The editorials themselves, formerly exchanged only once by post, are now sent by fax and discussed by email.

Ann and Amy made a couple of exchanges by post for each of the chapters of their joint book, with alterations highlighted and meta- comments given, such as

Do look at pages 10 to 15 because that 's where I've tr ied to incorporate your suggestions. [Ann: lecturer]

Exchanging drafts was common even where the collaborators worked in the same university or even in the same department, as it allowed the partners to retain control over their own time. This practice is of course na tura l where the responsibilities have been divided, but was also widely used where all parties were working on the same piece of text. So these exchanges took the form of mutual gifts of text followed by mutual gifts of comments in the first type of collaboration, and of a succession of revisions or suggestions for revisions in alternating turns in the second type. Where more than two writers were contributing to a text it was often the case that one person would take responsibility for a first draft which was offered simultaneously to all the other partners for additions and comments, which were then re turned to and acted upon by the originator. In these multiply-authored texts, which often arose from team research projects, the practice of shared responsibili ty for the whole text was less common.

Meeting Needs and Circumstances. Julie, a postgraduate student, reported a different kind of practice, designed to meet the demands of the planned paper. It was that of all three parties to the collaboration interviewing each other as the basis for producing three separate pieces of writing which would be 'blended' 'connected' and ' rearranged' at a later meeting. In fact however she reported tha t the next (two-way) collaborative piece she wrote was tackled by writing together, which she defined as "one person writing with the two of you deciding what words to put on the page", part ly because they had found the process of integrating the separately written drafts in the face to face meeting so difficult. By contras t Harr ie t , a mature unde rg radua te s tudent , described a final dovetai l ing session of this kind in her f i rs t collaboration with Gillian, a young undergraduate, as very satisfying. In a later collaboration with Tong she abandoned their plan, conceived in response to time pressure, to insert her contribution into the gaps in a s t ructure already part ly filled by him, wrote her contribution from scratch and repeated the kind of merging exercise she had done with Gillian.

22 Rache l R i m m e r s h a w

Paul, a lecturer , re la ted how the circumstances, facilities and avai lable wr i t ing technology meshed toge the r in a pa r t i cu la r collaborative writ ing event. At an in te rna t iona l conference, four 'dissidents' happened to be staying on for an extra day. At midnight, after a meal in which they had got to know each other better, they congregated in a small hotel bedroom. One of them had a laptop computer and had drafted a paper for an alternative position to the one promoted at the conference. Sitting on his bed, with two paper copies and the file open on the laptop, the others listened while Klaus read his draft aloud. The three others called out "flag" at any point where they wanted to query or comment, add or change, and Klaus inserted a mark in the text. Then they went back through the text discussing each point and amending the text, using Paul, the only native English speaker, as the 'stylistic' expert on the final run through.

Keeping ownership of one's own contribution was important in some circumstances. In a collaboration between lecturer (Kate) and student (Harriet), the following exchange underscores the importance of the medium used allowing a participant to keep control over their own part of the document. From this point of view the technology proposed (secretarial transcription) was inappropriate.

Harriet Kate Harriet

Kate

Harriet

I'll type this now. No need to. I'll get Jo to do it. Yes, but it's messy, with lots of bits to be inserted scattered about. Oh she's used to that. You should see what other people give her, poor thing. No, but it's more for my own sake really, I need to be able to see what I've said before I pass it on to you.

For Mary and Susie, unde rg radua te s tudents , get t ing together physically was an important par t of the technology which enabled their collaboration to succeed. In spite of living at opposite ends of the country they met for a long weekend together during the vacation rather than try to fit their collaboration round term-time commitments. Mary attributed the importance of this meeting to the necessity to know well the person you are writing with. By contrast a professional writer, Elvira, finds trying to work in the same room with her good friend Linda for any length of time, highly stressful.

In the case of professional writers face to face meetings tended to be valued for the late stages of production or revising and coordinating work ra ther than text production. Ann, a lecturer writing a book with a colleague in a polytechnic 250 miles away made a lot of use of the phone and postal exchanges, and said "We didn't physically write together except when we were editing." She describes a key meeting at her house in which they spent "the whole weekend with our chapters all over the floor" as a preparat ion for her writing the introduction to the book. Arthur 's collaboration on a book with an overseas colleague made making the best use of limited face to face contact even more crucial.


We m e t the yea r before t h a t for a weekend ... and did w h a t we could to check things out . . . . We spent some hours checking over th ings toge the r to m a k e sure we k n e w where we stood on the f inal t ex t we wan ted to p r e s e n t to the pub l i shers . . . . no t rea l ly m a t t e r s of subs tance ... i t s eemed m u c h more useful to discuss r eade r s ' comments face to face ... i t was good to have a chance to t a l k and rea l ly work out w h a t we w a n t e d to do to r e p r e s e n t them. [Arthur: senior lecturer]

Collaborative Roles and Writing Technologies

A n u m b e r of these wr i te r s connected the style of the i r col laborat ions, and t he i r roles and r e l a t ionsh ips w i t h in t h e m , to the technologies available, e i ther as they changed in t ime or in pa r t i cu la r c i rcumstances .

Using Differing Technologies. In one case us ing di f ferent technologies was identif ied wi th differences in the style both of composing and of the course handou t s produced, which the collaborators had to tolerate.

B e r n a r d came to word process ing a lot l a te r t h a n I did bu t was m u c h more f luent a t composing on a typewri ter , so he would bash th ings out fa ir ly r a p i d l y . , whereas I would w a n t to t h ink abou t i t more and have s o m e t h i n g which ended up on fewer b i t s of p a p e r . . . [he] had come to say a lot more t h a n he need have done . . I t wasn ' t real ly an i s s u e . . I wouldn ' t have done i t the way B e r n a r d did it , he w o u l d n ' t h a v e done i t the w a y I did.

[Arthur: senior lecturer]

Linda, a lecturer , cont ras ts wr i t ing wi th her colleagues Pam, who has a compat ible word-processor, and Sally, who has an incompat ib le one:

Because of the technology ava i lab le I felt m u c h more j u s t l ike wr i t ing a p a r a g r a p h to i n s e r t into w h a t Sal ly h a d d ra f t ed and then in pencil suggest ing some a l te rna t ives on ano the r bit, r a t he r t h a n total ly tu rn ing the whole th ing inside out as I migh t do with someth ing I 'm doing with Pam.

Preferred Technologies. There were cases where people s eemed to be ve ry a t t ached to a pa r t i cu la r technology because of the role i t al lowed t h e m to adopt . T h a t i t is the role poss ib i l i t ies r a t h e r t h a n o the r proper t ies of the technology t h a t lead to this a t t a c h m e n t is suggested by the appea rance in these da ta of some s t r ikingly different choices.

In one case, where the col laborators are seven or eight m e m b e r s of a r e sea rch project of differing s ta tus , the m e d i u m of choice is computer - b a s e d a n d the wr i t i ng p rac t i ce s enab l ed eve ryone to h a v e equa l contr ibut ion and revision rights:

We ac tua l ly developed a technique where nobody quite knew who we were wr i t ing wi th because we used to leave th ings on the m a c h i n e a n d people would j u s t add in and t ake out. Nobody


rea l ly knew who'd done what . I m e a n we j u s t used to le t i t emerge, pa r t i cu la r ly as the working hours of the project were essent ia l ly twenty-four , ... so t ha t was quite in t r iguing, seeing things change. [Cliff: professor]

In ano the r case, one of the favoured technologies of collaboration was t he i n t e r n a l c o m b u s t i o n eng ine ! H a v i n g d e s c r i b e d w r i t i n g collaboratively with J e n n y in these terms

It's a site on which conflicts in te rms of personal space and power are fought.

this is how Billy, a senior research officer, describes the i r practice:

We write a lot in the car ... (You dictate?) No, no ... I do most of the driving. So she pe rhaps would be physical ly wri t ing bu t it would be together. Now tha t usual ly works quite well.

Even more sat isfactory practices for these collaborators were e i ther to have clearly discrete areas of responsibil i ty in which they wrote, which worked because of the respect they had for each other 's work, or else to write notes for each other and then pass the whole responsibil i ty for the piece of wri t ing over to the other person.

Sharing or Dividing Responsibility. Keeping separa te responsibi l i t ies for different par ts of a joint text was one way of minimising the need for compatible media.

The ea r thquake las t year ru ined the whole thing, and so there was no exchange of disks ever, . . . , so it all had to be hard copy.

Where clear separat ion of responsibil i t ies for different par ts of a text have been defined the inabil i ty to directly alter, as opposed to comment on or sugges t revis ions to, the pa r tne r ' s t ex t was not a source of frustrat ion.

I t jus t mean t tha t we couldn't swap disks, bu t a t least any editing was easily done at each end. [Ann]

Not all collaborative wri ters would be comfortable wi thout direct access to an evolving text however. Linda expressed he rse l f ve ry a la rmed a t the necessi ty to use fax to wri te a collaborative paper wi th a research s tuden t based overseas, as she imagined i t would m ak e the process simply a "patching together of bits". For her "collaboration means at the ve ry least sitting together for many hours going th rough drafts". In fact, over a period of three months there were m an y exchanges by fax, with Linda copytyping the additions and revisions t h a t El izabeth sent her a t each stage, so tha t in practice her usual style of substant ia l ly reworking texts with her collaborators was still possible with this technology.


Managing Material and Social Differences. Collaborative practices were affected by issues of seniority, and deliberate strategies for managing the collaborative effort in such cases were reported.

He was very obviously busy and had more secretaries to protect him than I did ... (I consciously decided:) "Now I'm going to put pressure on him to do something". [Ann: lecturer, of professor]

At other t imes management could be less strategic and more circumstantial. For example Jenny acted as scribe with Billy in the car because he tended to be the driver. In the case of two undergraduate students, Tong and Lisa, Tong took on the role of scribe and tailor for their product since his first drafts were already wordprocessed and he owned the computer. When writing with Jim, a continuing education student, Linda (a lecturer) agreed to a collaborative practice in which they each wrote every draft in a deliberate attempt to avoid her senior s ta tus , and access to the word-processor, pushing J im into a subordinate role.

DISCUSSION

Why Prac t i ces are Important

In thinking about the design of support technologies for writing, what is the value of focussing upon writing practices as I have done here? It relates to my opening definition of technology as a means, as a practice, activity or tool which only has meaning in the context of the social practice in which it is used. It is the practices which have the primary significance. So in several cases collaborative writers changed technologies without changing their practices. Collaborators who chose the practice of writing together would do so with whatever technology they had available - - a pencil and the back of an envelope or a word- processor. Those who had to exchange drafts, or chose to, would use email or the post in the same way. And the writer to whom it was so important that a collaboratively written piece be "not just a patching together of bits" engaged in her usual practice by fax even though the technology didn't naturally lend itself to that style.

Nevertheless, while practices may be primary, they may also be constrained by the technologies available to support them. This is borne out by changes in practice which sometimes follow access to new technologies. One of the interviewees in this study spoke of significant changes to her solo writing practices on acquiring a word-processor. Timothy changed his joint editorship practice to one of frequent substantive discussion rather than fortnightly courteous exchange once he had email contact. A large research group were able to write their reports as 'emergent text' once they had multiple access to a common file on a mainframe computer.

The implication of these two findings is tha t while writers may welcome the changes in their practice which new technological designs


may make possible, collaborative writing support tools should not make more difficult those social practices which make cultural or intellectual sense to their users. In other words the tools should support what writers actually do or want to do, rather than what teachers of rhetoric or software developers think they ought to. (See Galbraith's article, this volume).

Implicat ions for Writing Environments and Tools

In considering what we can learn about appropriate kinds of computer- based support for collaborative writing from this research, an important principle must be to recognise the diversity of collaborative writing practices. So it would be a mistake to limit the facilities of a computer- based environment to those which could be made use of only in one style of interaction. It should be able to support collaborators like Billy and Lucy who like to be together to spark each other offin order to write, as well as those like Elvira who have chosen to collaborate but for whom the act of writing itself still needs to be private.

A congenial environment in a physical sense was often referred to as important by these writers. Ann told of how she "banished the family for two weeks" when Amy came to work on their book, which enabled them to spread out all over the floor. Cups of coffee, cosy restaurants, private rooms and home visits are all ment ioned many times. Portability may turn out to be an important feature of collaborative writing tools.

The spreading out Ann (and other interviewees) described may have less to do with comfort however than with the importance of having everything in view at once. Others also talked of the need at key stages in the production of a piece of writing to get a global view of it whilst also being able to get quick access to the detail of the text itself at any point. This kind of sense of the whole text is jus t what writers in computer-based media often say that they lack (Haas and Hayes, 1986), and which the work of Severinson Eklundh (this volume) addresses.

A computer environment for collaborative writing might aim to be congenial in its own way in order to facilitate the sense of social ease which seemed important to many. Daiute and Dalton (1989) argue that the playful character of collaborative interactions of ten and eleven year-old writers was part o£ what made them successful in composing together. They see these playful rather than planful interactions as having the function of beginning to expose cognitive conflicts and perhaps even more plausibly of modelling various aspects of text production. Durham (1990) also argues t h a t s tuden ts learn a rgumen ta t ion and rhetorical stance from the communicat ive imperatives of participating in computer conferences more effectively than through direct teaching. Seeing each other's wri t ten language formulations, whether in exchanging drafts or in email 'prewriting' discussions, may play an important par t in the development of collaborative writers.

Whether or not learning from each other is an important dimension in any writing collaboration, the ability to see modelled the partner 's


writing practices and styles may be useful for the coordination and development of the piece of writing itself. Linda and Harriet spoke of their preference for writing from scratch rather than to fill predefined slots in a partner's text. Having done so they needed to be able to see simultaneously both their own product and their partner's, just as Ann and Amy raking over their paperwork on the floor, or Arthur and Polly at their word-processor, did.

From Timothy and from Ann and Amy we also learn the usefulness of facilities for making meta-comments and linking them to specific parts of the text. Solo writers use the devices of highlighter pens, marginal comments and removable sticky labels to tell themselves what they want to do to a text. Where collaborative practices don't give participants the right to directly alter the common text, these facilities would be all the more important . Paul 's story of a four-way collaboration indicates tha t in addition to the ability to annotate, it could be important for collaborators with different roles or interests to identify the originator of comments or alterations for later discussion.

In some simultaneous styles of collaboration the single input device of the traditional PC keyboard was a source of frustration for the writers, as Arthur and Polly told. It may well be that the many other groups who used simultaneous oral composition with a single scribe might also find the provision of multiple simultaneous input devices liberating. The need to capture ideas or apt wordings as they are coined could be supported by the provision of as many 'notepads' as there are partners composing or brainstorming, from which the main text can draw by consensus.

Cyclical or exchange styles of collaboration can make use of brainstorm and annotation recording devices too, from which the current wri ter can draw, as Billy and Jenny do when taking responsibility for writing from the other's notes. These styles will often be associated with collaboration over a distance, so tha t the interchangeability of the media involved would be important for the smooth management of the exchanges.

The history of providing computer-based support to writers has not been a particularly edifying one. Costanzo (1989) reviews computer- based writing aids and shows them to have some of the sounding-board qualities of collaborative partnerships in the case of some 'prewriting' software, but to be largely oriented to the surface features of language in the case of revising aids. Dobrin (1986) argues tha t at worst such programs "give users exactly the wrong idea about language, tha t writing well is just satisfying some syntactic rules" (p24). However some professional writers who already have the 'right' ideas about writing well may still find such aids useless even if they're not damaging.

The Writer's Assistant (Sharpies and Pemberton, 1990) and Piolat and Belorgey's MIET (1991) are among the few examples where the design of a tool has started from an analysis of the writing process, writing task demands and what writers do in practice. The next generation of support technologies for writing must take the same approach.


ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to acknowledge here the support I have been given for this work from within my department, especially in relation to the transcription of tape-recordings. I am particularly grateful to all those people who kindly gave me many hours of their time to be interviewed or write reports on their experience of collaborative writing.

I should also add thanks to Bertram Bruce, Daniel Chandler, and Lydia Plowman, whose comments on a conference presentation based on this work contributed to its development.

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Problems in Writing with the Machine', Research in the Teaching of English, 20, 1, pp. 22-35.

Newman, J. & Newman, R. (1990) 'Three Modes of Collaborative Authoring', Paper Presented at Computers and Writing 3, Heriot- Watt University.

Piolat, A. & Belorgey, P. (1991) 'Psychological Contributions to an Idea Elaboration Tool', Paper Presented at the 2nd Bi-Annual Meeting of the EARLI Writing Special Interest Group, Paris, January 1991.

Severinson Eklundh, K. (this volume) 'Problems in Achieving a Global Perspective in Computer-based Writing'.

Sharpies, M. & Pemberton, L. (1990) 'Starting from the Writer: Guidelines for the Design of User-centred Document Processors', Computer Assisted Language Learning, 2, 37-57.

Street, B.V. (1984) Literacy in Theory and Practice, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.

Documents

Collaborative writing practices and writing support technologies