Collaborative Writing of Text and Hypertext

A good writer understands his audience. Collaborative writing allows authors to act as readers and thus to create text which an audience is more likely to appreciate. This paper describes four sets of experiences in collaborative writing. In one of the experiences secondary school students who were unable to produce a sophisticated document independently were able to produce a quality document through a group process. Given the correct combination of authors and goals, a simple computer editor can be very helpful. Hypertext differs from text in that links among chunks of text are made explicit. It could be argued that collaborative writing would work particularly well with hypertext because the links among the writers' ideas could be more easily explored. In experiences with graduate students at two universities, this hypothesis has not been supported. The students did not understand how these links should be created and thus could not collaboratively write hypertext.