Cinnabar and Alabaster

passages:
385. "collaborative composing activities provide writers with the explicit experience of talking about writing as they write and thus may serve as models for role playing the reader and the writer. the ability to critique as well as to create one's own writing is crucial for mature writers, and it is an ability that does not develop easily"; this helps. guiding questions for the study: "(1) what is the nature of young authors' collaboration? (2) how do young authors influence each other? (3) what do the individual and collaborative texts look like? and (4) what does coauthors' talk reveal about their composing stragegies and notions of 'good writing'?"
386. "the hypothesis was that students would share the various tasks in the writing process--physical chores, idea generation, monitoring activities, and evaluation--and that this sharing would expand each writer's repertoire of writing strategies"--(it might for example also free writers with technical skills issues up to worry about other elements while writers more technically adept handled those tasks); + "counterhypothesis" = perhaps "when writers collaborate, they interfere with each others' plans, literary voices, and judgments, thereby adding to the complexity of the writing act rather than simplifying it" which "may introduce additional burdens in the writing process rather than reducing them" and might make "collaboratively written texts less fluent and coherent" <--none of which is necessarily a bad thing, but might not be appropriate to all writing goals/situations.
389. overall result: "writers learned a lot in a short time from work collaborative writing experience"
390. "1 and 1 do not always make 2. rather, the collaborative texts are a blend of different contributions from each writer"--in her fuzzy math, the stronger writer's 1 + the weaker writer's 1 made 1 1/2 for him & 2 for his partner--still a significant boon for all involved. they don't necessarily produce more text--"they spend time talking about their stories" which efforts "take energy and/or time away from sheer production activities" but influence the quality of production the writers walk away with.
400. in co-writing 4 short (1-2 paragraph) stories, the boys "discussed character names, plot events; many issues of text form including spelling, punctuation, capitalization, spacing, commas, word choice, and paragraphing; word processing commands, and typing duties"<--(that's a lot of curricular hits!)
405-7. "children's intellectual collaborations are not a simple matter of two heads being better than one....[and] there is still some evidence that the collaboration adds complexity and perhaps even a burden to the writing process. it is posible that the collaborative stories have more simplistic resolutions because the children have not developed the abilities to reconcile smoothly their differing points of view....do not always have the negotiation skills to pursue or to resolve inconsistencies....[but] students...benefit from hearing each other compose out loud and trying out alternatives together, even if they do not discuss the pros and cons of alternatives in detail." "after collaborating on four stories for under four hours," the studied students "expanded their knowledge and practice about writing via a relatively unguided learning experience. they explicitly and implicitly shared their knowledge about the structure and form of story-making and story form"; conclusion: "they can learn from each other, even though all their coteaching is not explicit"; at the end "each writer gained more savvy than either had before their opened up their writing minds with a peer"