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Shared Writing of Academic Texts in the Digital Environment

Introduction

Writing an academic text has long been seen as the solitary work of one author. Today’s students and researchers, however, increasingly write in groups and work their supervisor’s comments into the text as they go. The classic advice on writing a thesis Eco, 1997 allows for such collaboration only in passing. The main findings are summed up in Table 1.

1.Theoretical background

1.1.Academic text as a process

An academic text does not come from a single draft but from repeated planning, writing and rewriting. Šanderová (2005) stresses that the author must think of the reader and of the logic of the argument from the start.

A good academic text answers the one question the reader asks at the start, and leaves no doubt about the answer at the end.

1.2.Tools for collaboration

The tools authors use when writing together fall into three groups:

• shared online editors, in which several authors work on one document at the same time,
• word processors supplemented by exchanging files by e-mail or through shared storage,
• version control systems, which record every change and make it possible to undo it.

2.Methodology

The research combined a questionnaire survey with semi-structured interviews. In designing the interviews we followed the principles of qualitative research Hendl, 2005.

The average number of co-authors per thesis was calculated as an arithmetic mean (equation 1):

3.Results

Conclusion

The thesis showed that writing academic texts together is common among students and that shared online editors are gradually replacing the exchange of files by e-mail.

References

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