Update to Abstract to Work on

*I added some of the elements discussed in the comments, keep changing :)

This essay will combine narrative elements with research data. It will incorporate screenshots of a collaborative writing project conducted for a doctoral class. We incorporate these examples to help tell the story of our project, as well as help first-year students understand that collaborative writing can be fun and beneficial. We begin the essay by situating ourselves as doctoral students who also teach first-year writing courses. Next, we discuss our rationale for choosing to create and use a blog as part of our writing process. Then, we provide a first-person story about our experiences with what we are calling process-blogging. We conclude the piece with practical advice directed to first-year students who choose to use a blog to write collaboratively.

With over six years' experience as first-year writing teachers, we see how our students grow frustrated with the conventions of standard academic discourse -- much in the same manner we felt the frustrations of acquiring fluency in doctoral-level discourse. As we attempted to cross the border from the familiar academic setting of our past into the unfamiliar setting of doctoral coursework, we felt a stronger connection to our first-year writer students. Because our pedagogies include collaborative and multimodal composing, and because many of our students already engage in networked writing, we decided to collaborate on a research project via a blog to see if this approach to composing facilitated our ways of negotiating space within academia. Further, we wanted to explore if this negotiation could be transferred to the writing practices of our first-year writing students. As such, we modeled the writing process our first-year writing students are likely to use as they compose academic texts. The data provided in this essay represents this process, including our voices as students and as teacher-scholars, which will be demonstrated through our stories and through snapshots of the blog. Ultimately, our findings suggest first-year writing students can use a blog in ways that allow them to explore

1. The relevance and usefulness of collaborative writing, including a discussion of the necessity of being able to write together within academia and the workforce
2. The personal/academic, private/public implications of collaborative writing
3. The processes condusive to writing collaboratively with an emphasis on the ways a blog can provide a platform for dialogic, integrated composing practices
4. The potential benefits and conflicts of using a blog when writing collaboratively