Technical Writing, 2nd Edition

10Writing with Collaborators

10.1Introduction

When writing substantial documents, and sometimes even brief ones, you will often have to work with others. In writing, as in any group endeavor, collaboration can be challenging. These challenges include noticeable and distracting variations in writing style, the mechanics of managing and tracking each other’s changes, and occasionally negative interpersonal dynamics.

The severity of these problems increases as the team size grows because the number of interactions between people increases. In fact, the growth of the number of interactions is exponential. To see this, let n be the number of people in the group. The number of pairwise interactions is given by

$$\frac{n\cdot (n-1)}{2}=\frac{n^2-n}{2}$$10.1

10.1

Equation ...