Small Collaborations

Note from your steadfast author: The following is a guest post from Dr. Will Duffy, an assistant professor of English and Director of the Center for Writing and Communication at the University of Memphis. His most recent work has appeared or is forthcoming in College English, Composition Studies, and Ethos: A Digital Review of Arts, Humanities, and Public Ethics. He can be reached at williameduffy@gmail.com.

I invited Will, a graduate school colleague of mine, to compose this guest post after a roundtable that he mentions in the first paragraph. Please note that the image in this post is taken from the infographic provided through a link near the end of the post. I have a copy of this infographic on the wall of my office--I think it's an excellent way to visualize the collaborative process of publishing scholarship. Please enjoy this guest post, because soon you'll have to read my dull, lifeless prose again. -- JB


At the Council for Writing Program Administrators (CWPA) conference that convened this past July at Illinois State University, I had the opportunity to participate in a roundtable discussion focused on the transition from graduate student to tenure-track faculty. With fellow panelists Jacob Babb, Annie Mendenhall, Erika Claire Strandjord, and Elise Versosa Hurley, we discussed such topics as time management, balancing service expectations, strategies for becoming active on campus, and building relationships with administrators. 

My talk focused on the concept of “small collaboration,” a term I recently started using to describe the types of engagement necessary for maintaining an active publishing agenda. Depending on the research expectations at your institution, combined with whatever is the level of your desire to be a scholar who actively writes, most new tenure-track faculty are expected to already be publishing—or at least to “show strong potential for future publication” as a lot of job ads will say in one form or another. 

I started experimenting with the processes of publication as a graduate student when I realized that no one was going to hold my hand and show me exactly what it takes to get your work in print. Mainly this involved simply responding when an opportunity for publication presented itself. It might be a call for chapter proposals, or a listserv post from a book review editor looking for contributors, or an invitation from a conference organizer to submit your work for a volume of selected papers. These are the types of opportunities I jumped at because they were the ones most conducive to small collaboration.

In my usage of the term, “small collaboration” indicates the deliberate acts of sharing that we pursue to improve our work. Starting a writing group, asking a colleague to read a draft in progress, and participating in a research network forum (RNF) are all examples. In short, whenever we voluntarily give our work to others to read and respond to, we are pursuing small collaboration. The examples I mentioned in the previous paragraphs are especially conducive to small collaboration because usually these types of publication require authors, editors, and reviewers to work together closely as they craft a shared vision for the final product. 

 

Figure 1: From Will Duffy's infographic. See link at the end of the post for the full poster.

For example, when my friend John and I responded to a call for chapter proposals for a book about faculty writing development, we were offering the editors a chance to use our proposal to further envision what the collection might be, which in turn—after they accepted the proposal—required their active feedback as we wrote, revised, and revised again the manuscript that eventually ended up in the book. There was no guarantee that the book would be picked up by a publisher, so the editors were just as invested in their contributors as the contributors were invested in the editors. Small collaboration, in this case the frequent dialogue and mutual feedback deliberately fostered by the editors, is what maintained the forward progress necessary for getting the project completed.

So why call this “small” collaboration? In the 1980s it became fashionable in the discipline of writing studies to argue that all writing is collaborative. But at best this claim is useless. It might make sense philosophically within a social constructionist epistemology, but practically speaking, all writing is not collaborative. Moreover, a lot of co-authored work (especially in the social sciences) isn’t very collaborative, at least not if we understood collaboration as a method for rhetorical invention. But arguing that all writing is collaborative can also potentially be deceptive, especially when you consider the myriad of artificial standards used by tenure and promotion committees. I like the term “small collaboration,” however, because it acknowledges the necessity of sharing implicit in most definitions of collaboration while simultaneously providing some semblance of scale. When a colleague offers feedback on a manuscript, for instance, he or she is certainly “collaborating” with the author to a certain extent. But that level of collaboration differs from the collaboration required when two co-authors decide to compose a manuscript together from scratch. Thus the term “small collaboration.” As I mentioned at the beginning of this post, small collaboration is how most of us learn to become scholars who publish because small collaboration is how experienced writers most directly mentor inexperienced ones: through acts of sharing.

I have one more thought about small collaboration...

Certainly small collaboration happens when we submit manuscripts to journals and move through the process of peer review. But I didn’t mention submitting work to journals in the examples I listed above because this level of publication can be the scariest for novice scholars. By no means am I suggesting not submitting to journals—you absolutely should. Just note that not only are the power dynamics fairly stark, but bad reviewers—“bad” because they offer ill-conceived advice, or are rude, or are clearly not interested in your subject—can greatly impair writers who are already feeling vulnerable. To cite another example from my own experience, it took close to a year for me to resubmit the first R&R I ever received because one of the two reviewers practically called my manuscript a joke, a response I didn’t know how to move past. Of course, good reviewers can and do provide the best advice you’ll probably ever receive from readers. Moreover, a quality journal editor will help the author(s) understand why or why not the manuscript in question belongs in that journal. This latter kind of engagement certainly qualifies as small collaboration: sharing in the form of (sometimes) anonymous feedback meant to encourage the author to improve his work.

We all have great ideas that would make for really interesting articles, chapters, and books. But it’s through small collaboration that we learn the difference between a publishable idea and a publishable manuscript.

Finally, to encourage my own students to invest in the processes of small collaboration, I’ve designed an infographic-y poster of sorts that depicts the different types of source material we can draw upon to start experimenting with publication. Feel free to use the poster if you think it’s helpful. If you are new to publishing, do note that the key is learning how to press the “send” button. Actually sending out your work is really the only way we can invite others to deliberately engage with the texts we compose. Being deliberate, in other words, is the only way to enact small collaboration.