This article is comprised of a collage of small segments of email conversation between the authors; it also includes fragmented quotes and diagrams. Consequently, it defies encapsulation in a typical abstract. Below is an excerpt that is perhaps the closest one might get to an abstract of this essay. This method of collaboration-which we are arguing is one in a panoply of others-is best represented by a text’s replicating it. This text speaks to its author/s’ collective intelligence, attempts to give it some definition by reference to the claims made here and the ways those claims were developed. The text, we might say, embodies collective intelligence and some of the ways, at least, that such intelligence is created. (Yancey and Spooner 60-61)

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I was talking with a novelist recently about various kinds of writing-nothing special, just happy-hour talk-and I found my earnest self assuring him that, oh yes, academic writing nowadays will tolerate a number of different styles and voices. (I should know, right? I'm in academic publishing.) He choked; he slapped my arm; he laughed out loud. I don't remember if he spit his drink back in the glass. Silly me, I was serious. And, among other things, I was thinking about this essay/dialogue, in which Interesting that you call it an we're turning discourse conventions of essay/dialogue (nice slide, that the net-often a rather casual medione). But many readers will exum-to some fairly stuffed-shirt acapect a real essay here-or, betdemic purposes. terworse, an academic essay. And we know what that means: a sin-