Developing an Own Voice in Academia

The notion of authorial voice, which has received much theoretical and pedagogical attention over time, has become more complex in recent years. No longer can a writer’s voice be portrayed as singular, totally unique, and completely separable from other voices. This chapter, which interrogates the concept of voice, examines various social and cultural factors contributing to communication of “voice” in academic writing. After a consideration of the reader’s role in interpreting voice of a writer, the focus is on the issues of authority and authenticity in scholarly writing. Attention goes to discourse resources, such as metadiscourse and self-mention, that are thought to communicate these features but which vary across fields, national and disciplinary groups, and genres. Several important studies are then reviewed to show the kinds of difficulties that students experience as they attempt to develop authorial voices that communicate some degree of authority and authenticity that are...

1983

International Journal of Education,Modern Management,Applied Science & Social Science (IJEMMASSS), 2023

This paper explores the intricate world of "Authorial Voice in Academic Writing," exploring its multifaceted dimensions and implications for scholarly discourse. The authorial voice is defined as the unique expression of an author's identity and style within academic texts. Through a comprehensive review of the literature, we uncover the historical evolution of authorial voice in academia, tracing its development from a detached, impersonal tone to a more engaged and subjective approach. Theoretical frameworks, including Bakhtin's dialogism and voice as stance, offer valuable insights into the dynamics of authorial voice. Linguistic markers such as pronoun use, hedging, and stance markers shape the author's voice, allowing for the effective engagement of readers and establishing credibility and authority. We explore the challenges authors face in cultivating a distinct authorial voice within the academic landscape, highlighting the need to balance individual perspectives with disciplinary expectations. Ethical considerations and potential pitfalls in expressing an authorial voice underscore the importance of maintaining academic integrity while embracing subjectivity. Moreover, we investigate how authorial voice influences interdisciplinary research, collaborative academic work, and discourse. This paper concludes with potential directions for further research, suggesting avenues to explore the impact of authorial voice on reader perception and the negotiation of voices in collaborative settings.

Voice and Speech Review, 2018

2021

Integrating ideas from ''They Say / I Say'' is a huge challenge and crucial element of social interactions in academic writing. In addition to considering voice as socially constructed, it is also seen as a selfrepresentation. Writing a paragraph that includes various authors' views on a topic provides an opportunity for your own 'voice' to shine through on the subject (Everitt-Reynolds, Delahunt, &

Ibérica, 2010

Palgrave Macmillan UK eBooks, 2012

Journal of English for Academic Purposes, 2008

This anthology, edited by Ken Hyland and Marina Bondi, comprises 12 articles comparing academic discourse in different academic disciplines. It deals with various types of written texts, such as journal articles, abstracts, acknowledgements, textbooks and book reviews. It also includes three papers on spoken academic discourse, which gives the book a larger scope than most earlier genre volumes. Somewhat surprising, however, is that none of the papers deal withdor even refer todstudies on other languages than English. For scholars interested in academic discourse more generally, a more lucid title of the anthology would therefore have been ''English academic discourse across disciplines.'' This, however, should not discourage scholars with other focuses than English from reading the book, as it presents a number of interesting and inspiring studies on academic discourse.

Metadiscourse in Written Genres: Uncovering Textual and Interactional Aspects of Texts, 2017

The writers of any scientific community are inherently expected to fulfil some agreed-upon discourse conventions of the academic discourse community (Molino, 2010) in the sense of creating a successful dialogic interaction through their texts. In line with this, Akbas (2014b) raised the question of “how and to what to extent writers foreground their explicit manifestations or hide their personal projections with impersonal forms’’ (p. 56). Considering the fact that academic writing is closely linked to the representation of authorial self (Hyland, 2002) and the voice of the postgraduates has received relatively less attention, in this paper, we explored the notion of explicit (via I and we-based instances) and implicit (via passive and impersonal instances) representation of postgraduates as the novice writers in the Social Sciences; namely, Turkish native speakers, Turkish speakers of English and English native speakers. Therefore, the focus of the paper shall be on the variations of personal (first person pronouns) or impersonal (agentless passives and inanimate subjects) uses of authorial references as well as their discourse functions in the postgraduate writing. In total, 90 successfully-completed dissertations of three postgraduate groups were randomly selected to compile the corpus of the study, and a corpus-informed discourse analysis approach was applied in the identification of choices of authorial representation in this genre. Following an extensive manual analysis of the texts from the corpus for each group, a list of explicit and implicit authorial references was extracted from sample texts to be explored in the analysis of the whole corpus. As was applied by Fløttum (2012), during the identification of authorial references, all verbs collocating with the explicit or implicit authorial references were examined carefully to see if the references performed author visibility in the texts. The quantitative analysis clearly showed that Turkish L1 and Turkish writers of English preferred to build mainly an impersonal impression over what they were presenting to the reader by employing a greater number of implicit authorial references whereas English L1 writers chose to create a more self-prominent academic prose. The qualitative analysis provided some evidence to argue that three groups employed explicit or implicit authorial references to accomplish particular discourse acts (i.e. guiding readers through the texts, elaborating an argument & making a claim, restating data collection, analysis and other methodological issues) strongly associated with the nature of discussion section.

2002

A good deal of research into academic discourses has seen itself as a branch of Applied Linguistics, that is, the main motivation has been with a practical application in mind. This is perhaps one of the reasons why it has almost exclusively concerned itself with the study of the written text, and focussed specifically on the research article and the textbook. These are the genres that millions of students all over the world will have to grapple with in English, irrespective of their mother tongues. Less practical research like the historical study of academic texts has for other but quite obvious reasons also dealt with the written text, and it is only quite recently that the research community has begun to take an interest in the spoken language. This is not without conceivable applications either, for example with international student mobility growing, and the constantly increasing international conferences based on oral presentations.