Following the Core Competency guidelines collaborative writing projects can help students to:

1."Analyze and evaluate oral and written communication in terms of situation, audience, purpose, aesthetics, and adverse points of view" by offering a situation, audience, purpose, and opposition within the group itself. A writer working alone must often imagine the rhetorical situation in which she finds herself; collaboration is a real rhetorical situation.

2. "Express a primary purpose in a compelling statement and order supporting points logically and convincingly" by, again, allowing students to work within an actual social situation. Group members will often have different perspectives and opinions, both on the issues the project addresses and on the means with which to do the addressing. These kinds of negotiations lead directly to the kind of argumentation suggested by the objective.

3. "Use effective rhetorical strategies to persuade, inform, and engage" by providing a real and often novel audience and context for their composition work: their group members. In his famous essay "Inventing the University", James Berlin notes the need for students to have a real audience. Collaboration provides an audience and a purpose for a host of compositional and rhetorical activities.

4. "Employ writing and/or speaking processes such as planning, collaborating, organizing, composing, revising, and editing to create presentations using correct diction, syntax, grammar, and mechanics" by emphasizing the multimodal requirements of collaboration. Group members will often meet face to face, communicate over various written media and over the phone; these modes of communication each require their own organization and a high degree of clarity in order to work at all.

5. "Integrate research correctly and ethically from credible sources to support the primary purpose of communication" by demanding clear and reasonable research for the purposes of intra-group discussion. Working in groups, students' different perspectives will provide a good check on the worth of researched information.

6. "Engage in reasoned civic discourse while recognizing the distinctions among opinions, facts, and inferences" through your assignment's parameters. Though collaboration does not automatically suggest these distinctions, forcing students to work through the implications of different kinds of knowledge will satisfy this objective.

Before you choose to incorporate collaboration, it is important that you recognize its effectiveness in terms of NMSU's curricular guidelines. By understanding collaboration in light of these goals, you can design assignments to specific and rationalized ends.