A Bakhtinian Exploration of Factors Affecting the Collaborative Writing of an Executive Letter of an Annual Report

Abstract

This chapter focuses upon the executive letter of the 1986 annual report of the Auldouest Insurance Corporation, described by one employee as "the most revised piece we do all year". It describes and analyzes the ghostwriting process of the two-page letter, a process that, remarkably, took 77 days. The social forces influence all facets of language because, as M. M. Bakhtin asserts, "verbal discourse is a social phenomenon—social throughout its entire range and in each and every of its factors, from the sound image to the furthest reaches of abstract meaning". Centripetal and centrifugal forces also affected all phases of the recursive writing process. Most importantly, members of student and professional writing groups need to be folly aware that collaboration is much more than waiters putting words on paper in the right syntactical and denotative order. During invention, centripetal and centrifugal factors worked accordantly to suppress conflict and yet to increase its potential for damage.

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