Writing is Personal
I'd start the essay with the following quote:
Writing is personal; editing may be collaborative.
And it holds true in all cases. Even if you collaborate with your colleagues to work on a writing project, I would still say that writing is personal because it's impossible for two or more people to write simultaneously on a topic.
Sometimes, I collaborate with Bikash to write some highly technical posts and guess how it proceeds — I write and he reviews my writings, then he writes and I review his writings and this keeps repeating several times.
Clearly, writing is personal to you and your colleagues; it's editing that you're collaborating on. Yes, you can edit by yourself and that's why I have used "may be" in the quote above.
Just to be clear, by the word "personal" here, I do not mean that the person who writes something, owns it; I mean that the writing process is a personal process.
I don't know why the term collaborative writing even exists. It is not suitable and writing can never be collaborative. I would suggest replacing the terms with "collaborative publishing" or "collaborative work" or "collaborative report or book", you get the idea, right?
If a book has 2 writers, the following are the possibilities of their collaboration:
- both wrote some parts of the book individually and then both reviewed or edited each other's work
- one person wrote the book and the other person edited the book
And in both cases — the writing is personal; it is editing that they collaborated for.