Collaborative Writing: "Shoulder Surfing"

Hazel Markus, highly regarded social and cultural psychologist, participated in a “How I Write” conversation on Nov. 7. As in other social sciences, engineering and natural science fields, most of the writing in psychology is done and signed by multiple authors in what could be called the great chain of revision. John Bravman, a materials scientist, has described how he works on these collaborations: a graduate student produces an initial draft that is reviewed and rewritten by all the people involved, one after the other. The draft finally reaches the primary investigator who then fills it up with red ink and sends it back down the chain again.

Hazel does it differently. She likes to sit with her collaborator, one person on the keyboard and the other looking over her shoulder as they fashion the piece sentence by sentence together. She has even worked across long distances this way, with both writers wearing phone headsets and both working on the identical text on their computers. One reason she likes this style of working is that it keeps her thoughts from meandering, and it keeps her from literally wandering off.

I’ve written in such a manner in two situations. I would sit at the keyboard and the client for whom I was working would feed me information, checking as we go. The client would get ideas, I would try to articulate them, then we’d check it together to revise. I would also write collaborative poems with friends, each of us alternating lines in a kind of game of wits, one line extending or abruptly clashing with the previous line. But writing in this way for social science seems highly unusual.

Hazel compared her style of joint work to similar collaborations programmers do in Silicon Valley. One programmer would sit and the other would lean over her shoulder in the way Hazel described. This is called “shoulder surfing, ” a wonderful term, and I imagine that a lot of people “shoulder surf.” How many people “shoulder surf” in academic writing?