Close enough to meta

I just realized that not only are we on a blog, but we also have an English professor as a teacher, yet no one has gone meta. Prepare for that to change, as I start our slow descent into self-referential Hell.

…Nah. This post isn’t nearly enough to open the gates to the inferno.

Today, I did have a meta-moment (you can slap that prefix on anything!). As I was editing our Google doc for the portfolio 2 essay, I could not help but wonder who wrote it. Now, I know I literally typed the first page and a half, and my partner literally typed another page, but it still seemed odd. To be exact, I happened to be editing my partner’s section: she had written a page, but I did not like some of her phrases and words, so I replaced them with what I thought would better illustrate our point. But now that I had changed a few words in the middle of her writing, could she still call it hers? Could I really take credit for it, with my minimal contribution? I don’t think I want to call it both of ours, since each of our contributions were independent of each other and non-consensual. The bigger question for the class would be, who owns a collaborative piece of writing?

One thought on “Close enough to meta

  1. Shannon Moran Post author

    This is an interesting discussion point. It happens a lot in academia, too. Not as much in English/Humanities writings, but in the Sciences, many academic papers are written by two or more authors. From what I can tell, in such cases both names are credited with authorship. I’m not sure that readers question how much each person contributes to a work, nor am I sure that that is what matters.

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