Because of the nature of the project we were all working on over the course of the class, there were many overlapping things I noticed as each group reflected on the process. The first successful thing that showed up in all groups was great group communication. Most, if not all, groups started off with a joined texting or emailing group. By doing this, everyone in the group was always in the loop with things and nobody was left out if they couldn’t make it to class. I feel like all groups in the future must have this from the very beginning because it made working collaboratively much smoother. Another thing that worked really well for almost everyone in the groups was peer review. A couple of groups noted that having an outside perspective from a group doing a grant that completely differed from their own was helpful. By doing peer review as a group with another group helped give a variety of perspectives and it was like you were having four people look over your work instead of just one. Peer review especially helped groups with word count, cohesiveness and even writer’s block.
An issue that kept holding groups back was worrying about the repetitive nature of writing a grant. I learned that there’s a difference between being repetitive because four people are writing on a grant and writing a full-bodied grant proposal. When Arthur Anderson visited our class, it was really comforting for us to hear that writing grant proposals will be repetitive because that’s just how they are. However, it was important for each group to go over their grants at the end and make sure the repetitiveness wasn’t because of disjoint voices in the writing. My group did this during the final edit. Each person in the group took a part of the grant that needed work and looked it over to write it in a way where it sounded like it was coming from one voice. That was a really important part of revision for us.
