Collaboration Seems Frustrating When You Don't Drop the Ball

Collaborative sounds like an easy task, until you actually have to do it. You don’t realize that you have to take into account other people’s opinion, other’s motives for writing, and you have to account for everyone schedule too. It’s hard. And my group dropped the ball this week. Between our misunderstanding for the assignment and our hectic schedule our “collaboration” was tougher than I think we anticipated.  

We used Google Docs as our method of choice because it was most familiar and easiest to use and we settled on telling a coming-of-age tale because it was the first suggestion made and we all uploaded our stories individually. Instead of having a collaboration with our similar stories intertwining with one another we used each other’s stories and writing techniques to craft our coming-of-age tales.

I, myself, did not a have a comprehensive knowledge of all the tools the Google Docs had to offer, like being able to see all of the revision history and different authors using different colors. After seeing what other groups had done and how the used Google Docs and all of its advantages I can see how collaborative writing can be a good thing and how it can help to produce a good piece of work. I know that if I were to do this again, I would understand the tools we have better and be able to use them to my advantage.

As I say in other groups there is a downside to collaboration that my group did not face. It can lead to a decent amount of frustration too. I know that one group shared their frustration when it came to editing their essay and determining who had the final say in what was okay to include in the final piece. “Any collaborative writing endeavor promises a representative articulation, a compromise of voices and points of view: eventually.” (Editing Out Obscenity: Wikipedia and Writing Pedagogy, Explanation in Process).

This process reminded me a little of Hood’s Editing Out Obscenity: Wikipedia and Writing Pedagogy. Even though this not Wikipedia, it is still a collaborative effort to instill a certain knowledge to an audience.  Similar to Wikipedia you have multiple authors trying to get a certain point out and sometimes those thought processes do not mesh and what one author finds important may not be important to another which can lead to taking out phrases and sections which can lead to frustration between authors or editors. This is the biggest con when it comes to collaborative writing that I saw.

I think if we had understood our assignment better we would have been able to sympathize with the struggles that other groups seemed to face. I think that collaborative work would be a fun and useful tool for leisure, but when it comes to an assignment it’s more of a hassle than anything, especial when you drop the ball.