In increasing numbers, educators are saying that collaboration provides our business, professional, and technical communication students with opportunities to enhance their analytical skills in a realistic social context and gives them experiences that parallel those they will encounter in the workplace. One way we can help students prepare for the workplace is to teach them to plan documents collaboratively, in ways that more closely resemble experienced writers who consider a variety of rhetorical elements.My goal in this article is to discuss collaborative planning as a heuristic that students -whether individual writers, co-authors, or team collaborators -can use to deal with the rhetorical elements often considered by experienced writers when they plan and prepare documents. In this discussion, I define collaborative planning, identify its benefits, discuss its implementation in upperlevel business communication courses, and present a series of examples of students dealing with rhetorical elements during the collaborative planning of a coauthored document. Collaborative planning is one way to begin to unravel the mystery of what students do when they plan to write. EXPERTS' PLANNING STRATEGIES By the time upper-level students are immersed in their majors as juniors and seniors, they are learning to manage the disciplinary content of their writing. However, they often still struggle during planning. They don't always find it easy to elaborate on ideas, consider alternative perspectives, or reexamine their existing plans. And we, as their teachers, sometimes have difficulty in fostering what we see as necessary-the richness of elaborated planning and the reflection that results in reconsideration of and, later, commitment to the plan. Part of our students' difficulties may stem from the way we teach. For example, when we discuss the writing process, we may unintentionally simplify the process by analyzing it and separating it into understandable segments (e.g., prewriting, composing, and revising). Then we expect students to integrate these segments when they actually write, a task they're often ill equipped to do.Of course, we tell them that the segments are part of an integrated whole, but we have few strategies to show them how the writing process really works, to show them how to write like experts.Typically, experienced writers, unlike inexperienced writers, integrate a variety of planning strategies that enable them to develop elaborated plans. Experienced writers focus on the kind of planning that suits the situation. If they are writing a document that has a familiar pattern or format with standard elements, they can use schemcz-driven planning, calling on their knowledge of &dquo;richly instantiated schema&dquo; (Flower, Schriver, Carey, Haas, & Hayes, p. 4,1989). Experienced writers who have a vast store of knowledge about the subject may use knowledge-driven planning if their information is organized in a way that is appropriate for the task and audience.When experienced writers find that schema-dri...
