Parallel writing occurs when a team divides Collaborative Writing (CW) work into discrete units and works in parallel (Sharples et al., 1993), as depicted in Figure 1 below. This strategy is also referred to as a separate writer strategy (Posner & Baecker, 1992) or a partitioned writing strategy (Ellis et al., 1991). The term parallel writing was chosen because it conveys work in parallel by multiple writers, and such work does not necessarily have to be partitioned into separate sections. The benefits of this strategy include more efficiency than sequential single writing and more working autonomy and anonymity (although specialized CW technologies must be used to gain the latter two benefits (Ellis et al., 1991)). In contrast, some problems that can occur with the parallel
writing strategy include oblivious writers (Ellis et al., 1991), poor communication (Ellis et al., 1991), stylistic differences, and information overload.
Parallel writing can be further divided into two main types: horizontal-division writing and stratified-division writing. Horizontal-division writing is the most common form of parallel writing in which each participant is responsible for a particular section of a document (Stratton, 1989), as depicted in Figure 1 The chief disadvantage of this approach is that divisions are often arbitrary and are not based on core competencies. The document is divided into sections and each author is assigned a section that he/she is responsible for. The completed sections are submitted to the team leader who assembles them together to form the final document. This approach is sometimes called horizontal-division writing (Lowry et al., 2004).
In contrast, stratified-division writing is a form of parallel writing in which participants play a particular role, such as editor, author, or reviewer, based on their core talents (Stratton, 1989), as depicted in Figure 2.With this strategy, a team divides the CW task into discrete units and works in parallel. This model has several variants. In one, each team member is assigned roles such as writer, reviewer, editor, and so on, depending on their expertise. Members then work on the document according to their roles.
Exercise steps (Alred et al., 2003):
- Designate one person as the team coordinator.
- Collectively identify the audience, purpose and project scope.
- Create a working outline of the document.
- Assign segments or tasks to each team member.
- Establish a schedule: due dates for drafts, revisions, and final documents.
- Agree on a standard reference guide for style and format.
- Each member should research and write a draft of their assigned document segment.
- Exchange segments for team member reviews.
- Revise segments as needed.