Team Writing
Bedford Series for Technical and Professional CommunicationSecond Edition| ©2025 Joanna Wolfe
ISBN:9781319339760
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A Guide to Working in Groups
Features
New to This Edition
"I have used Wolfe's Team Writing in my courses since it was published, and I think this update is excellent. It's timely, relevant, and comprehensive. It builds on the excellent information from before and takes into account the newest technologies in relation to teamwork and collaboration."– Kara Poe Alexander, Baylor University"This is an exciting series that would breathe fresh life into a business writing course because of the various books within the series, taking topics and dedicating a book to each rather than presenting them as chapters in a larger text. The series truly becomes customizable to course goals and learning objectives."– Laura La Flair, Belmont Abbey College
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Team Writing
Second Edition| ©2025
Joanna Wolfe
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Team Writing
Second Edition| 2025
Joanna Wolfe
Table of Contents
Chapter 1: Planning Your Collaboration
Case study: The audit report team – A case study of misaligned expectations
Exercise 1.1: Analysis of the audit report team, Original scenario
Effective teams maximize productive conflict and minimize unproductive conflict
An alternate reality: the audit report team redux
Exercise 1.2: Analysis of the alternate reality
Effective planning for a written document involves three main components:
- Agree upon goals and deliverables
- Identify and merge competing goals, values, and expectations
- For Discussion: Competing goals, values, and expectations on the audit report team
- Create processes and timelines that allow for substantive revision
Different stages of the project involve different types of collaboration:
- For Discussion: Collaboration types on the audit report team
Effective project management holds the different stages of collaboration together. Teams need to select from different families of tools:
Exercise 1.3: Tools and Processes on the audit report team
Virtual teams have unique challenges
Summary
Exercise 1.3: Identifying competing priorities
Chapter 2: What Makes a Good Team?
Successful teams have high collective intelligence
Exercise 2.1: Reflect on your previous team experiences
Diverse teams have high potential, but require extra effort. Collective intelligence increases with equal participation:
- Equal speaking time
- Equal information-sharing
- For Discussion: Identifying unique perspectives on your team
- Proportionate contributions
- For Discussion: Participation on the audit report team
Successful teams have high psychological safety:
- Create psychological safety on your team
- Practice active listening
- Avoid complaining; set a positive tone
- Create judgment-free zones where even mistakes are appreciated
- Treat mistakes as learning opportunities
- Seek out difference
- Communicate about things that have nothing to do with work
Exercise 2.2: Psychological safety on the audit report team
Exercise 2.3: Creating psychological safety on Victoria’s team
Use positive, future-focused statements
Exercise 2.4: Positive, future-focused statements
Successful and psychologically safe teams are data-driven
Summary
Exercise 2.5: Analyzing your conflict management style
Chapter 3: Project Management
Exercise 3.1: Reflect on project management of a previous project
Projects can be managed to have more or less iteration of the phases
Exercise 3.2: Evaluating project management styles
Exercise 3.3: Selecting a project management style for your project
The project manager’s role at each project phase:
The initiation phase
- Define the project scope in a scope statement
- Exercise 3.4: Draft a project scope statement
- Understand the team in a team charter
Planning phases: Create and update the task schedule
Implementation phases:
- Monitor progress with regular check-ins
- For Discussion: Sharing obstacles
- Troubleshoot obstacles and team problems with early intervention
- Notify stakeholders of obstacles by asking for advice
Assessment phases:
- Review the work and plan the next phase
- Review team processes with informal surveys
- Review team processes with organic data from the project
Callout: Accessing Document Revision Histories
Case Study: Is the problem individual contribution or something else?
Exercise 3.5: Collecting team data
The closing phase
Summary
Chapter 4: Getting Started with a Team Charter
A team charter records norms, processes, and roles:
Sample team charter
Different kinds of teams have different kinds of charters
Prepare for the team charter
Exercise 4.1: Preparing for the team charter
Meet to develop a team culture:
- Balance individual strengths and weaknesses
- Balance commitment levels
- Build consensus around revision norms
- Exercise 4.2: Building consensus around revision norms
- Build consensus around communication norms
- Exercise 4.3: Analyzing media
- Build consensus around timeliness norms
- Exercise 4.4: Merging timeliness norms
- Develop troubleshooting guidelines
Responding to violations of the team charter
Summary
Chapter 5: Getting Started with the Task Schedule
Identify Major Tasks:
Exercise 5.1: Define tasks
Define project roles:
- Options for defining unique project roles
- For Discussion: Expert vs. novice review
- Determine criteria for each project role
- For Discussion: Experience vs. Motivation to Learn
- Exercise 5.2: Define project roles
- Define roles by interest
- Define roles by tool sets
Assign roles:
- Practice strategies for breaking stereotypical thinking
- Systematically consider each criterion separately
Callout: What if one person is most qualified for multiple roles?
Assign consulting or back-up roles
Consider rotating roles
- For Discussion: Assigning roles
Plan milestone and meeting dates
Plan meeting inputs and outputs in advance
Schedule and assign individual tasks
Balance the workload
Troubleshoot project dependencies
Adopt appropriate tools for maintaining task schedules
Exercise 5.3: Draft a task schedule
Summary
- For Discussion: Comparing task schedules
Chapter 6: Writing and Revising Together
Agree upon where you are going: Define criteria up front:
- Finding and analyzing model texts
- Exercise 6.1: Finding and analyzing model texts
- Analyzing your audience(s)
- Exercise 6.2: Analyzing your audiences
- Planning for accessibility
Use straw drafts to jumpstart your collaboration
Exercise 6.3: Straw draft
- For Discussion: Straw drafts
Decide upon composing tools and processes:
- The ability to avoid competing versions of the document
- Formatting capabilities
- Integration with special tools
- Internet access issues
Exercise 6.4: Deciding upon composing tools and processes
Decide upon revision processes and tools:
- The feedback method
- The direct-revision method
- Choosing a method
- For Discussion: Deciding upon review and revision tools and processes
Make substantive suggestions grounded in shared criteria:
- Review project criteria
- Focus on global changes in the early stage of a draft
- Focus on language and formatting changes in later stages
Exercise 6.5: Practicing positive, future-focused feedback
Assign a team member to do a final edit for consistency and accessibility
Summary
Chapter 7: Running Team Meetings
Determine the purpose and structure of the meeting
- For Discussion: Structuring meetings
Prepare for the meeting:
- Prepare and circulate an agenda
- Require homework and pre-reads
- Conduct straw polls or surveys prior to the meeting
Exercise 7.1: Plan a meeting
Structure conversations to increase equal participation:
- Establish no interruption rules
- Use criticism-free periods to generate ideas
- Establish turn-taking rules to equalize discussion
- Be systematic about making decisions
- Use polling tools
- Use screens to focus attention
- For Discussion: Structured conversations
Have good group etiquette during the meeting
Use additional strategies for virtual meetings:
- For Discussion: Virtual meetings
Follow up after the meeting:
- Update the task schedule
- Distribute meeting minutes
Callout: Action items in meeting minutes vs. Task schedules: What’s the difference?
Exercise 7.2: Analyzing meeting minutes
Summary
Exercise 7.3: Troubleshooting problematic team meetings
Chapter 8: Troubleshooting Team Problems
- Decide who to involve
- Pick the medium
- For Discussion: Selecting meeting
- Phrase the communication to focus on solutions
Callout: Address problems early
For recurring problems, work to discover root causes
- For Discussion: Role-playing root cause analysis
Troubleshoot problems with showing up and turning in work:
- Problem: A teammate misses a meeting
- Problem: A teammate turns in poor-quality work
- Problem: Your initial efforts are unsuccessful
Troubleshooting problems with personal interactions:
- Problem: My team doesn’t trust me to do good work
- Problem: My team isn’t listening to me
- Problem: Other team members are not committed to a high-quality product
- Problem: My teammates do and say things I find disturbing or demeaning
- Problem: My teammates are not open to revisions to their work
Summary
Exercise 8.2: Troubleshooting
Appendix
Sample Meeting Minutes
Authors
![Headshot of Joanna Wolfe](http://prod-cat-files.macmillan.cloud/MediaResources/Authors/207W/16060641.jpg)
Joanna Wolfe
Joanna Wolfe (Ph.D., University of Texas at Austin) is Director of the Global Communication Center at Carnegie Mellon University, where she develops new methods for improving communication instruction across the university. She is the author of numerous scholarly articles on teamwork, gender studies, collaborative learning technology , technical writing, and rhetoric Her research on collaborative writing in technical communication classes won the 2006 NCTE award for best article reporting qualitative or quantitative research in technical and scientific communication.
![Cover: Team Writing, 2nd Edition by Joanna Wolfe](http://prod-cat-files.macmillan.cloud/MediaResources/Jackets/258W/9781319339760.jpg)
Team Writing
Second Edition| 2025
Joanna Wolfe
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