Group Project Writing

Workplace teams have been lauded for improving the quality of decision making in an organization, for fostering innovation and creativity, and for improving productivity. Recognizing that organizational structures are getting flatter, it is not surprising that employers are increasingly seeking college graduates who are well prepared in teamwork. As a School of Business student, you will be assigned one or more group projects. These projects will typically involve some type of research that will need to be written up as a paper, and you may also be required to give a presentation about your findings to the class. In this section of the Guide to Writing we will give you some general advice on how to approach and successfully complete this type of assignment. As always, you should follow your professor’s instructions completely and ask your professor about anything about which you are unclear. In fact, the most important point we can stress here is to follow the professor’s specific guidelines.

Professors have differing expectations for how to approach a group project. Some professors expect each group member to focus on his or her particular strength and divide the work accordingly (e.g., a finance major may take the lead in the financial aspects of a group project). Other professors expect that each student is equally involved in each phase of the project. Whenever you are part of a group, it is important that no matter what type of assignment all group members understand thoroughly the work that is handed in. The professor expects you to learn about the whole topic, not just the area that you prefer.

When writing up a group report some professors will expect the entire group to work on writing the whole paper, while other professors may require that each group member write up an individual section. Where the latter approach is used the professor will still expect the paper to read as a consistent, coherent “whole” which means the paper must be edited to ensure that the paper reads smoothly without jarring transitions from one section to the next. While it might make sense to let the strongest writer in the group act as the overall paper editor, this does not mean that the rest of the group members can simply “dump” a rough draft on the group editor and expect the designated editor to polish or rewrite that section. A clear, coherent and well written report is EVERYONE’S responsibility in the group.

As you probably have noted in other sections of the Guide to Writing, accuracy of details, precision in language, clarity of organization, and attention to audience contribute to the overall effectiveness of a course paper since it greatly enhances the persuasiveness and acceptance of your analysis and proposals. The two most critical ingredients to making good decisions for all writing tasks is to always keep in mind the purpose and the audience for your project report. Is the purpose of your paper to describe a situation in detail or to bring the spotlight to some aspect that needs urgent fixing? Is the purpose of the group project to recommend a change of policy or to discuss alternatives and be creative?

In terms of audience, two particular cases are worth remembering. Your professor is the most obvious audience for your paper. This is especially true in research papers when the group has to convince the professor of the quality of the analysis and the strength of the arguments. When writing a case analysis, an auditing report, a financial market analysis, or a marketing plan, your professor will often indicate that the audience for your paper is either a manager, the Board of Directors, an auditing committee, or a group of shareholders. What this usually means is that your paper has to address the specific concerns of that particular audience, be written in a particular professional way, and still convince the professor.

Three Special Demands of Group Writing

Group writing projects impose special demands on writers in addition to those of single authorship. These demands include

1. Coherence throughout entire text from the executive summary, to the introduction, through the analysis and through the conclusion.

2. Consistency of tone and voice from one section to the next.

3. Uniformity in formatting.