ENG/215: The Relationship Between Collaboration And Argument

ENG/215CA
10/5/2013
The Relationship between Collaboration and Argument Collaboration papers could be considered by many as one of the easiest papers to do, but also considered but others as difficult to accomplish. Both of them have their advantages and disadvantages, but it is up to the person to decide which method is more useful to complete the assignment. It is seen by most people that a collaborated paper is an easy assignment because the amount of personnel involved on the paper, the amount of time that requires to perform the research of the material that wants to be included in the paper, if several people are after the same topic. Different resources are used to supply the material to the team such are books, newspaper articles,
or web pages. One of the problems we might encounter during the search and use of resources is the validation of the resource, how reliable can be, and if it is really useful to be included in the paper, the last thing a team wants is to use incorrect or invalid information that will be presented to others causing misinformation and at the end, a bad grade by the instructor.
Writing a collaborated paper could also be considered a learning experience, members can learn from others, members from different backgrounds and culture can be really helpful to have a mix of ideas to be included in the paper. To others, a collaborated paper could be a huge headache and very difficult to do due the disagreement by the members and all the ideas by each one of them. Every person is different, and so are the ideas. Each member has a different opinion, thoughts, and different way to see things. We might not agree in some things with others during the process, arguments, yelling, and discussions are more likely to happen, so a plan and a team leader is recommended to ensure things run smoothly before they can get out of hand. Numerous amount of ideas are brought up to the table and each member explain his or her point of view to the rest of the members, some might have suggestions and some might agree, not 100 %, but at least some of the members are on the same page. These are ideas are all put to the side and used to make the final product, but it not always easy to reach this point of the process. Arguments papers could take several hours and in occasions day, the
reason why? Discussions among all the members to come up with a final idea or ethos. Some teams create their ethos by vote or by mutual decision, also resulting a time consuming step during the whole process but it is one of most important step while putting a paper together, it will represent the entire group’s belief and the mutual agreement of everyone, with that being said, the entire team has to ensure all those ideas that were put to the side are enough and cover every single step of the paper. It is not an easy decision to decide which ideas will make it to the paper because every member wants to feel like they are contributing to the job, a few ideas might get left out causing some discontent by some of them, but it is the team’s leader job that does not occur, ensure that everyone is involved during the process and they are all satisfied with paper. Lack of participation and irresponsibility by some of the members could hurt the team’s paper a major factor to not receive the grade wished by them after all the hard they have put in to get the job done. To minimize the arguments and confusion, there is another group of people that rather work individually, in this case, the writer has a lot more thinking and search to do and it is the only person responsible to come up with paper.
Some of the positive points about doing a paper alone is that all the resources will be reliable and valid for the paper, there is no argument with others, and the writer’s ideas are going to be the only ones used for the paper. Negative points about working alone are the amount of time used by only one person to do all the work, it might take long hours to be able to find use all the resources and find what is needed to complete the paper. Another negative point about working individually is the lack of support by others, no suggestions or opinions from others about the paper could be difficult, there is always good to have another set of eye to review your work or extra help from someone to maybe see or think from a different point of view and also to ensure that the material covered is the correct material to avoid submitting a bad paper, which at the end, there is only one person to blame for, the writer. In most cases, during the learning process to write a paper, it is not up to the student the decision to work as a team or alone, but once again, it is a learning process where mistakes are going to be made, either working collaboratively or individually, a lesson is learned that in the long run will result on the improvement
of knowledge on how to write a collaborated and argument paper as a team or alone.
With team collaboration you have the advantage of seeing not only your work, but the work of others. You must avoid plagiarism but it can give you ideas towards your work. Different writing styles, grammar, and punctuation are all key points of a paper which you observe with other collaboration papers. When we write papers we tend to miss little mistakes or oversee them. Seeing others work is an example of proofreading and when doing this with other papers, you see mistakes that possibly the writer can not see. We can also give positive or negative feedback about the paper. “Such collaboration is beneficial for the review quality as long as the principal investigator remains involved, to contribute a wide experience of the field and to provide guidance.”(Natures Methods) This was an example from Natures Methods of when seeking outside sources to contribute to peer reviewing, having someone who has experience or credibility in the topic you are discussing. It gives the writer more credibility when you are discussing an intriguing argument or topic.

Work Cited
"A Method for Peer Review, a Peer Review for Methods." Nature Methods 3.5 (2006): 329.
ProQuest. Web. 16 Sept. 2013.