Week 13 Journal

To collaborate means to work together as a group. People use collaboration for multiple purposes, whether it is to justify a certain argument, to complete a rather complex project or assignment, to sustain and improve a potential community, or a combination of any of the three. In the required reading, we see collaboration in action, as a girl by the name of Heather Lawver creates a web-based school newspaper known as The Daily Prophet, which revolved around the fictional world of Harry Potter and attracted a bustling community of fans who both read and write about what currently goes on in the fictional wizard world. The staff who run the newspaper, which consists of Heather Lawver as the managing editor and around 102 children, work and discuss initial projects and topics together before publishing any official content for the public eye to see. The staff who run the site are always eager to go over each other's work, making sure that there aren't any minor mistakes or mix-ups. The fact that fans of the Harry Potter series visit the site to read the various articles also exemplifies collaboration. The staff choose to publish articles for The Daily Prophet to express their own imaginations, as well as to potentially fulfill the imaginations of other fans. The amount of visitors that the newspaper site attracts dictates just how well the staff of The Daily Prophet are carrying out their job.

In terms of what role collaboration plays on everyday writing, it is a unique action that provides a much stronger effect for the desired work that one (or many) are focused on. For example, designing pamphlets and deciding what should be written on the pamphlet and in what form is a common objective that members of certain organizations and clubs tackle in order to get other people to consider joining. Also, as gravestones exemplify everyday writing in terms of context, it is imperative to work with staff who are in charge of what kind of material the gravestone will be made out of, as well as being the ones who implement any sort of design to be put onto the stone as requested by relatives of the deceased. The epitaph is also a crucial piece of a typical gravestone that must be implemented by means of collaborating with funeral-related staff. As we can see from these two examples mentioned, collaboration plays a big role in some forms of everyday writing by putting together a final product which would have most likely had a disastrous outcome if not for the help of others. Collaboration is an action, which without question, helps polish the outcome of a subject of work.