Writing to Learn in Teams: A Collaborative Writing Playbook for Students Across the Curriculum

＂Informed by years of the authors’ teaching experience as well as thorough research on teamwork across multiple settings, this guide effectively brings together the practical, psychosocial, and pedagogical elements of collaboration and collaborative writing. Beautifully designed and appealingly readable, it is the finest and most comprehensive interdisciplinary text on this subject that I have seen. It should be required reading for students in every writing-intensive course.＂

＂Here it is: a theory-based guide (or ’playbook’) for students engaged in team writing that is at once resolutely practical, deeply insightful, and chock-a-block full of strategies for working successfully together. At the heart of the book is empathy-for every member of a writing team as well as for all audience members: the authors know that attitudes and feelings are directly connected to how and why team writing groups work-or don’t. Sound principles of design thinking, transparency, and teamwork are at work throughout this text, as team members practice critical thinking, imaginative research strategies, and writing, writing, writing. Especially important is the discussion of ’next-level inclusivity, ’ which recognizes not only the importance of diverse perspectives to the quality of work a team produces but also the difficulty of achieving real inclusivity, along with practical advice for doing so. The concluding chapter importantly builds on this advice in its discussion of ’next-level collaboration, ’ which focuses on how team members can best understand and be open to one another, how to build trust, and how to solve problems-together. Students and instructors across the disciplines will find much food for thought-and for thoughtful practice-in this provocative and helpful book.＂

Joe Moses teaches collaborative writing, research, and project design in the Department of Writing Studies at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities. Jason Tham (PhD, University of Minnesota) is Associate Professor of Technical Communication and Rhetoric at Texas Tech University. Moses and Tham’s first book in the Playbook Series, Collaborative Writing Playbook: An Instructor’s Guide to Designing Writing Projects for Student Teams, was published by Parlor Press in 2021.