Coffee: My Creative Juice

It’s 9:30 but it might as well be 5:00 in the morning. In order to catch the bus and be here for my EWM class I had to skip my coffee today. I’m groggy and struggling to pay attention while my professor begins discussing our next major project. A key word newsletter? I thought no one read news letters anymore! And what’s that…my key word is collaboration. Okay, now we’re talking. I can do that, it’s just talking about group projects, right?

We actually, as it turns out that’s only half of what collaboration entails. I was lost looking for sources until my professor suggested I try Googling “Joseph Harris+ Collaboration.” Those were the magic words! Although I couldn’t track down Harris’s full work I did find many abstracts of his theories on community. In addition I found a familiar face, Kathleen Yancey, a well know rhetorician. I found one paper in particular which really changed things. It was written by Yancey and her collaborator Spooner back in the nineties. They wrote in a disjointed format with obvious breaks when transitioning authorship. The paper was smartly composed to demonstrate an alternative view on collaboration. Rather than merely classifying group work, working together on one cohesive final project, as collaboration. Yancey and Spooner demonstrate that the product of collaboration can be and should be disjointed. The final work should show influences of all the collaborators authorship, rather than appearing as if it was written by on collective entity.

I was floored! You mean those dreadful team projects we all struggle with aren’t the epitome of rhetorical collaboration? Armed with my new perspective on collaboration I set out to spread the good news to the masses. Hey you, know that group project you're dreading? Well stop there’s another, better way!

After hours filled with caffeine, editing, formatting, color switching, more caffeine, Google image hunting and a bit more reformatting. Success! Newsletters that can catch freshmen students’ attention and help them understand the truth about collaboration.

The moral of the story is never underestimatie the power of caffeine…oh, and collaboration is more than just working in a group. It’s about creating a final project that combines the best of what the authors have to offer.