Remember team projects in middle school, high school, or even college? Were you the person who did everything themselves dragging the deadweight through each step? Were you the person who just wanted to be told what to do so you could get it done and stop thinking about it? Were you the person who had lots of ideas but no one seemed to be listening to any of them? Or were you the person who dreaded the entire thing and would rather work alone than deal with the other people?

No matter who you were then, chances are those experiences negatively affected your attitude about working in a team now. Especially if the outcome of your teamwork is a written document or presentation–since that’s how pretty much every school project ended.

You probably don’t mind working with your team to do your job or handle clients or meet your responsibilities so you get paid. But if you have to work with others on a report?! Yuck.

Let me tell you a secret. Your teachers in school had two reasons for assigning you group projects:

1) the good reason–because you are going to have to work with other people for the rest of your life, so you have to start figuring out how to do that in school.

2) the bad reason–because team projects mean less work to grade. And teachers are not paid enough for all the work they have to do outside the classroom and on top of being around students (And summer break is required to maintain sanity, during which time they are mostly not paid, so, no, it’s not enough).

Now, the fascinating (to me) difference between school work and work work is this: students are less motivated to do school work because they are paying for the opportunity to learn (an opportunity many of them won’t appreciate for decades). But professionals are generally more motivated to do work work because that’s how they make money (which they then have to spend on their children’s ever-more-expensive and less desirable educations).

So, what we don’t learn as students, we end up learning on the job–like writing as a team.

How to Make Group Writing Easier as a Professional

The easiest way to make writing as a team less painful is to have really good project management and communication.

You will likely have a final deadline for delivering the writing project. The whole group knows it has to be done by then.

The key to success is working backward from there to determine what needs to happen in order for the project to get done and by when each step needs to be completed.

Proofreading: Last

For example, proofreading should be done last. Once all the content is in place and everything is the way you want it, you need to go through the document and check the grammar and accuracy of the content. This includes checking page numbers, headings, any numbers or data in the document, visuals, and sequencing, margins, and other details.

Proofreading Checklist

Here’s a checklist of what needs to be reviewed before submitting a final product:

1. Examine words across line breaks.

2. Review all document titles and headings for errors and consistent format.

3. Check page numbers or other numbers that may be out of sequence.

4. Make sure all numbers are correct without inversions or mathematical errors.

5. Confirm names and professional titles.

6. Verify capitalization of all proper nouns, especially names of people and places.

7. Check that the formatting corresponds to the document specifications.

8. Make sure abbreviations, symbols, names, dates and other details are consistent and correct.

9. If there is a Table of Contents, make sure it matches the body’s headings and page numbers.

10. Check that any attachments or enclosures are attached or enclosed.

And ideally, each item on the list should be reviewed separately by more than one person. You can have each person on the team sign up to complete 1-3 of the tasks, and make sure the work is checked by another person on the team. So you have a primary and secondary reviewer of each item (you can have more reviewers, if the document is really important).

And here’s another list of suggestions for how to proofreading effectively:

Tips for Effective Proofreading

1. Wait at least 15 minutes before attempting to proofread your own work.

2. Slow down and focus on accuracy.

3. Use the grammar and spell check in your word processing program.

4. Read your work aloud to yourself.

5. Read your work aloud to someone else.

6. Touch the page or screen with your finger or a pencil.

7. Read your work backwards one sentence at a time.

8. Print out the document and mark it up by hand. It helps if it’s double-spaced.

9. Cover the document so that only one line shows at a time.

10. Start your review in a different spot each time.

I would also recommend having each reviewer start in a different spot in the document so that not everyone is reviewing beginning to end. This process of not having everyone start in the same place should also be used during the editing process. If everyone reads beginning to end, the beginning of the document will be really good, but the end could be a disaster. That’s because our attention drifts off as we perform a task. We tend to be more focused at the start than after we’ve been doing it for an hour. Each person starting their review at a different point in the document will ensure the whole thing is as good as it can possibly be.

All reviews should be completed at least 2 days before the deadline, so you have time for any final lightbulb moments to pop into your brains. Basically, your team should establish a fictional deadline that is 2 days before the actual deadline. Most likely everyone on the team will need 1-5 days to complete their proofreading tasks, proofreading would start at least one week before the fictional final project deadline.

Whole Writing Process

Then you would back each step out from there based on the time you have available and how long you want to or can spend on each step. Here’s the full process start to finish with guidelines for allotting your time:

Writing Steps in Order

Plan and Outline–5% of total project time (ideally, at least one week to give each person time to contribute)
Research and Write–10% of total project time (ideally, at least one week. Now that tasks have been assigned, people should be able to schedule time during their week to complete their part)
Discussion–5% of total project time (ideally, a meeting after first 2 steps are complete and before starting on step 4)
Edit and Revise–70% of total project time (ideally, two or more weeks with scheduled deadlines for each review/feedback and revision/writing)
Proofread–10% of total project time (ideally, at least one week to allow a few days of rest before reviewing the final draft)
Fictional Deadline–2 days before final product is due
Submit final product–Deadline

Plan: Figure out the deadlines for each step and start discussing who is good at and wants to be responsible for which parts.

Outline: Create a rough outline of the topics you think your writing project will cover. I would recommend making this as a shared document, whether in Google Drive, OneDrive, or another program. Save the outline so that people can add and change it. You can use the outline as the main file for the writing project or duplicate it so you have one guiding document and one working document. Use the outline to assign parts to different writers, basically who wants to work on what. Try to ensure balance among the parts. Some people will naturally write more than others, but you want to try to make the assignments equitable in terms of expected content or length.

Research and Write: Some people will start writing and do research as they go along. Some people will want to research first and then start writing once they have all the information at their fingertips. Either way works. What you want is for everyone to get started on their parts and for them to be fleshed out by a particular date.

Discussion: Now that the information is there, everyone should read it all and make any suggestions about order. Would it make more sense to have one idea before or after another idea? Did one part of the outline not end up being relevant so it should be deleted? You built the outline without knowing exactly where the project would take you. Now is the time to revise that outline based on what you have discovered in researching and starting to write.

Editing: Once you have all the basic content in the order you thought would make sense, you’ll want to start editing. Have a conversation with your team about basic editing etiquette. What should people go ahead and change? What should they put as a comment? How will you recognize whose content is whose? I like to assign different font colors to different contributors so we have a visual of whose language is where–it’s helpful at this stage.

Each person on the team should then edit sections written by others. While you can “fix” grammar, that’s not the goal here. The goal is to help each other’s rough writing become the best version it can be for your intended audience.

You want to look at your teammate’s writing for clarity–do you understand what they have written? Do you have questions about what they have written? Where would you like more information or explanation?

You can review their writing for conciseness–where you have ideas about how to express something more effectively and with fewer words? Delete unnecessary language, make the writing conversational, define complex ideas and terms for the reader.

And you can review their writing for tone–does it sound the way you want it to sound? Will it get the emotional response from the reader you want to get? Most professional writing should be emotionally neutral, meaning it should present the information in an interesting, but factual and objective way. If that’s the case for your project, delete opinions, guesses, and as many adverbs (-ly words) as possible.

Once everyone on the team has reviewed everyone else’s rough draft, the original writers should be given the opportunity to revise their writing. They can “fix” things that feel easy to them and leave things for further discussion or for other folks on the team if they don’t know how to fix them.

Your team can go through this process of reviewing each other’s work and having the section “owner” revise as many times as you like before your deadline. When I wrote Bada$$ Business Writing with my co-author John, we probably went through this cycle 4-7 times. The first times through, we gently gave feedback on each other’s section, but by the 4th time through, we were making the changes we wanted to see in each other’s sections.

By the time editing is finished, readers of the final document should not be able to tell who wrote which parts and the whole thing should feel cohesive, unified in its vocabulary, sentence structure, and tone. To make that happen, make sure that each person has worked on every part of the document, not just the one they started. Every person on the team should feel ownership over every part of the final product.

Proofread using the suggestions from above, making sure that is the last step in preparing the final product and that your team gets it all done by the fictional deadline. If you can, wait a few days between finishing the editing and going on to the proofreading. The more time you have between those two steps, the better your review will be.

The fictional deadline gives you a few days to think of any final things. You might end up changing an image or realizing that the page numbers aren’t formatted correctly. You never know what will stand out to you once you think the project is over. Give your team the benefit of all your subconscious brains by turning to a new task. That’s the moment when your brain will realize what the previous task should have had.

Hopefully, this process will help your team make sure that your final product reflects everyone’s ideas, everyone’s work, and everyone’s styles. Remember, the client is paying for your team’s expertise–that’s why they asked for this work. Make sure that all of you shine in delivering the best work to that client.

Writing as a Team Sport