Afternoon Solutions, Part Two

Notes from Table II

Which of the world’s communication ills will we cure?

Writing by committee?

What can we do to facilitate the process of writing in groups or writing by committee?
Empathize with the target audiences?

There is a “Tyranny of the writer” in collaborative writing: use of ‘master’ doc that then is passed around to be edited→ the result is tinkering at the edges. The final outcome then falls on arbitrary responsibilities and the thinking process is short-changed.

Two Rules: Getting to the starting point and the core: what are we trying to accomplish in our communication?

There are similar examples working such as writing with a public safety committee and collaboratively writing service manuals for technicians, or a collaborative report from an online course.

There is the importance of facilitating people through the landscape:
• Seeing landscape, topics, audience
• Thinking in human terms of relating material to audience
• Brainstorming details for each topic
• Final stage = sequencing, this is often where logical problems arise

Could this all come down to just talking about brainstorming and outlining in different languages?
Yet the difference is the lack of sequence.

The following requirements need to be met:
1. All contributors need to have something they can see
2. In a business setting: they describe an actual, real world result – the whole group is then on the same side to hit that target

At the end of the process, everyone in the audience will ______?
This last part must be clearly defined: everyone needs to be aiming at the same target.

This is what many call “seeing the vision”-Know thy target market, know thy target audience. And so Collaboration doesn’t begin until ‘seeing the vision.’

There are four fundamental elements.
• Audience
• Shared vision
• Research
• Brainstorming (successive waves of brainstorming…2nd draft of brainstorming)

Question: Are we allowing for the ways in which individual people work?

For example: why over-emphasize brainstorming? Because brainstorming is used so much in corporate situations it is important to expose students to it.

Question: How would we go about promoting these skills?
In different Communication Intensive Courses such as Introduction to Business

What would a writing consultant do here at Baruch College?
A full evaluation of the existing process:
• Who is charged with giving them these skills;
• Who are the players?
• What is the ultimate audience? (The students?)

Professional writers and collaborative writing in the work place is more complicated by the number of ‘stakeholders.’ The writing process is the most difficult behavior to change in a company. Changing a writing process often must come from the CEO. This can become a business issue/business function.

Great story from Roy Speed:
He was invited by Lucent Technologies to talk to their technical writers. There were about 750 technical writers producing manuals at a huge volume. Speed observed one writer creating a manual and discovered that the technical writer had never actually sat down and spoken with one of the users of the software!
Speed brought the technical writer from Ohio to Boston to talk to a guy actually using the
software and the manual. After 20 min., the writer said: “Everything I thought was wrong”: useless to the customer.

Know the audience.