Week 13 Journal

What does it mean to collaborate? And what role does collaboration play in
everyday writing?

Collaboration is a combination of the thoughts, efforts and input of multiple individuals working towards a common goal or purpose. In order to collaborate, the people involved must be able to not only give their own personal ideas but also take those and combine them with the thoughts and ideas of others in a cohesive manner. It does not involve just one persons information, but rather a collection of a multitude of individuals' information put together to create a new product or text with influences from similar and yet distinct ideas. I consider collaborations to be mixtures of similar content, one added on to the other and each one slightly differing from the last. Collaboration plays a major role in everyday writing in that every single thing that is written down, no matter the content, the author, or the method of displaying the text,  originates somewhat from other peoples' previous ideas. It is through a lifetime of exposure to the everyday writing of others that we create our own writing, taking bits and pieces of the elements that we have unconsciously collected over time. For example, the commonly used storyline of hero, power, journey, conflict, and success is everpresent in every type of media because each of the creators were influenced by what they had seen or been exposed to, and decided to make the idea their own. Collaboration is the reason that the world contains an astronomically large amount of books, movies, and shows. These forms of media influence the public that consume them and then the public individually produce their own everyday texts such as email, scrapbooks, social network posts, and so on. Everything that we write out of our free will has roots in the ideas of other people who have influenced us without our consciousness. In the article, for example, children take the basic information and plot from the Harry Potter series and incorporate their own versions and ideas of how the text could have been. In my opinion, they are not attempting to steal the copyrights of this popular series of novels, but instead add to it and also better their own writing skills in the process of doing so. It is often through shadowing a role model that children eventually find their own specific talent and abilities, and it is through this collaboration that they are able to do so possibly more quickly and efficiently than they would be able to had they not had the opportunity to collaborate. In this way, collaboration is and will always be a part of everyday writing because it is the way in which individuals absorb ideas and information that they can later alter to form a new, modified product.