ABSTRACT
Collaborative writing (CW) is widely performed in industry, academia, and government. Understanding the process of CW can create efficiency and other positive returns for large organizations. This chapter provides a foundational discussion of the activities and strategies of CW and summarizes current research in the area of CW. Often, collaborative writing is described in terms of writing activities such as brainstorming and drafting. Authoring strategies and document control strategies are used to govern these activities. Modern work in CW research has focused around thinkLets. CW software tools can take advantage of thinkLets to implement support for each CW activity. Collaboratus is the only tool that is designed to meet the needs of distributed and diverse CW groups. Collaboratus has a version control feature that allows participants to see the changes that have been made to a particular section of a document.
