You write, I write, we write.

We went to a conference last week on higher education pedagogy and I was lucky enough to attend a couple of great sessions on student writing and collaborative writing.  While at the collaborative writing session, I realized that if my life were a pie chart sans sleep, 60% of my waking hours would be spent thinking about or doing some kind of writing activity.  I didn't intend for that to be the case, but I find that now that I'm in it, I rather like the way my relationship with the written word is shaping up.  I began to contemplate authorship more generally, but some brief background on all the writing before I get into that, as I think it's easy to not realize all the different kinds of writing we do every day.

Professionally, the research group I'm part of just sent off a great paper on advisor / graduate student co-authoring, and there are more papers in the works on that topic.  Another large project I'm working on examines plagiarism in graduate students - what it looks like and what the explanations might be.  As part of this study of graduate student writing, I'm hoping to get a first author publication out of it that focuses on my take on what we're seeing.  Last week, I worked with some engineers on a grant proposal, my first one where I had to contribute original text and ideas (that was a big deal btw).  I'm also sitting in on a grant writing class, for which I'm putting together an entire grant all on my own about an idea that could be my future PhD dissertation about science blogging, another kind of writing. So I spend my professional days thinking about other peoples' writing and then doing a lot of writing of my own.

Personally, I've been working on this book for a while and I have this blog.  I think it's easy to discount blogging as a form of writing, but I think a lot about what ends up here, and there's research that says writing is thinking, that the writing process forces you to organize your thoughts and make meaning of your experiences.  I do a lot of that here, summarizing and contextualizing my life.  The book is a whole other kind of writing, where I get to spin a tale and think about writing style.  I'm always reading and I find that I respond to a certain writing quality, a kind of simplicity that I'd like to emulate in my own fiction, even if fiction isn't my forte.

Now back to authorship...

While sitting in the session on collaborative writing in student groups using wikis, I began to think about all the different kinds of writing I do.  How some of it is collaborative, how some of it is not, and how much of it falls along a spectrum from entirely sole-authored to entirely collaborative, in which I think my own contributions and those of my collaborators become eventually indistinguishable.  All these different writing tasks require different skills, and some of them we teach well to students and some of them we do not.

Students do a lot of single authorship writing in school - we want to know what they know.  How well students end up being able to write individually is something I still question (remember the plagiarism project?), but I know that they don't write well in groups.  I'm not sure if I still write well in groups.

But a fundamental question I've been tossing around is what it means to be an author in the first place.  This has a very specific meaning in academic writing in which you are or are not a named author on a written work.  However, in a larger way, what must you contribute to a piece in order to be an author vs. an editor vs. a kind of adaptor and gatherer of information?

We accept that writing original text is authorship - I'm the author of this blog and I'm going to be the first author of the paper I'm writing on plagiarism, which means I will generate a lot of the basic text as well as the overall thrust and direction of the paper.  However, a lot of blogs are more like information aggregators.  They're bringing together information from all over the web to say something new.  So how much of something new do you have to contribute before you're an author?  I've also worked on academic papers where I've written very little original text, but I've read many iterations of the paper, contributed ideas and textual changes and helped significantly shape the paper to address our eventual audience.  Even though I probably wrote nothing larger than a sentence here and there, I would still say I'm an author of that work.

At what point did I become comfortable with this much more amorphous idea of authorship?  And oddly enough, academically, I'm much more comfortable now with non-sole-authored academic writing.  This plagiarism paper will be the first major academic work that I'm taking the lead on in our group, and I find that I'm terrified of trying to pull together a cohesive package of ideas that flow and build an argument.  Up until now, others have primarily done the driving, and perhaps I have been backseat driving a bit.  Now I have to take the wheel on something, and I'm quite nervous.

The oddest thing about this is that my own progression (and the progression of the grad students I'm studying)  is one in which you start out contributing in a small way to a larger work, and over time you contribute more and more of yourself until you're eventually ready to be a first-author, to take the lead.  It's a kind of apprenticeship model.  We don't teach K-16 students how to write that way at all.  There is such a focus on single authored writing that I don't think students even realize that most of what you write after graduation involves a team effort.

Not sure where all this is leading, but I think it's a good framework for thinking of my own progression as a writer.  You're not just a good "writer," you're a good writer or a bad writer in different contexts.  It's a wide set of skills and rather than just being frustrated when it seems like it's not going well, it would be more productive to think of it as a range of skills, each of which needs to be developed and honed.

I'm an author in progress.