Various authorities outline the benefits of collaboration in the form of classroom writing groups in learning certain writing skills. Collaboration promotes interaction, dialogue and negotiation between reader and writer. Whether the collaboration resides in interior dialogue or communal discourse or both, collaborative discourse can enable the student to gather a more objective perspective on the meaning and structure of his/her writing. The question for State University of New York (SUNY) Empire State College's Center for Distance Learning became, "How can collaborative learning strategies be implemented successfully in a guided independent study course in writing for adult students?" The answer involved three important strategies to help students at a distance develop the type of critical discourse that occurs through collaborative writing groups: (1) use of a structured learning journal (one in which students are given specific questions to lead them to an essay-form production); (2) a course structure with revision and repetition of the writing process in different contexts built in; and (3) clear criteria for evaluation. The structured learning journal reproduces all except one of these functions of collaborative writing; it reproduces the "directive" function least well. However, a series of learning journal questions that coordinate with required essays can help students generalize writing concepts and processes by offering them the chance to ask the same critical questions about different texts within different contexts. Ultimately, the use of such learning strategies can reproduce the effects of face-to-face discussion and enable the adult, independent, distance learner to function at the metacognitive level of a collaborative writing group. (Contains 11 references.) (TB)