In my experience, a common pitfall occurs when people work on a project in a group – the issue of cohesivity. There will always be the brilliant idea to split up the workload, with each person working on individual sections. This can be an effective way to work on something as a group, but the trap is that the group must regroup every so often and explain what they have done to their group. When people work on a project in groups there can be a problem with a consistent voice and tone (in the case of a paper or presentation) or with consistent labels (for lab and studio based projects). Counterintuitively to most, the best way to make sure there aren’t issues with consistency is to work on individual sections in individual documents. When group projects work on the same document there can be an issue with people’s formatting getting messed up. To avoid this it is good to first get your own thoughts out the way you conceive of them in your own document, and then share what you’ve done with your teammates and discuss thoroughly. This way group projects can incorporate different perspectives but still be cohesive.

Another big part of maintaining a cohesive group project is to have outside eyes looking at projects. This can be done by actually working collaboratively with another group in the same class (I’ve found this very effective especially in lab classes). The act of simply having another few people read what you’ve written as a group will not only give you a fresh perspective on what you’ve written but also it will help you as a group figure out what else to include. A rule of thumb I’ve operated by is: “If someone asks you to explain something when they read your paper, whatever you said to explain it should be in your paper.”