Why "why"? The Importance of Communicating Rationales for Edits in Collaborative Writing

Collaborative writing is prevalent, yet is rife with issues of discomfort and miscommunication among others despite access to limitless text. Editing, one key activity in collaborative writing, is prone to such issues, and providing rationales could be a promising solution. To understand the efficacy of rationales in this context, we conducted an online experiment pairing 40 participants to co-write two essays on Google Docs—one without rationales (control) and another with rationales (treatment)—followed by post-experiment surveys (N=40) and interviews (N=11) with participants who received edits with and without rationales. Despite no significant differences between conditions in survey results, interviews revealed that most people preferred collaborating with those who provided rationales and perceived them more favorably. All interviewees deemed rationales important in collaborative writing and felt the pros outweighed the cons. We contribute design recommendations with illustrative examples for effective collaborative writing.