Voice in thesis writing – why does it continue to engage us?

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authorial voice, Researcher identity, Voice in thesis writing

Claire Aitchison

So much has been written about voice in research and thesis writing and yet it continues to be a perennial concern amongst bloggers, writing teachers and researchers. In a recent supervisory discussion, I was reminded again of just how contentious this issue can be.

Photo by Jason Rosewell on Unsplash

What is voice?

Some people consider voice simply in terms of rhetorical and linguistic devices, but for me, it is SO much more.

I think of ‘voice’ as the sense of the author conveyed, intentionally or otherwise, through a host of interacting features including affect, tone, style, self-revelation and involving complex issues of identity, intent, and academic and disciplinary practice. In other words, I regard voice as a social practice of identity making. In this, I am heavily influenced by the work of Ros Ivanič (1998) who sees voice in relationship to an author’s struggles with authority, self-representation and personal history. For doctoral writers and their practices, these struggles are in direct relationship with questions of the ‘autobiographical self’ (the writer’s life-history, the motivations driving their research scholarship), the ‘self as author’ (i.e., the authorial self, the authority they bring to their writing) and the ‘discoursal self’ (a writer’s representation of self).  Some of this identity formation through writing is conscious and some unconscious, sometimes it is conflictual, and it is always contextual – influenced by the norms and practices of the discipline, the methodological approach, the topic itself, the impending examination, and perhaps even the preferences and predilections of the supervisor!

Social aspects of doctoral writing, courtesy of Marmalade the rabbit

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Researcher identity, Writing as social identity; the reader as significant other

By Susan Carter

You probably don’t pay much attention to the image we have as our banner branding the DoctoralWriting SIG blog. Take a look at it now—there’s a hand at the keyboard of a computer, and it holds a ballpoint between two fingers telling of work on both hard and soft copies and thinking across both. Over to one side there’s the top of a notebook and a document held together with a binder clip, evidence of all the reading and interconnection of texts that sit behind academic writing.

That’s a pretty neat image for a blog on doctoral writing, right? But what you do not know about is the back story to this image, a story that contains a rabbit. This post discusses why the rabbit is missing as an analogy to what you might leave in or take out of doctoral writing.

Doctoral writing: the incentive of space

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Doctoral writing, Emotion & writing, Researcher identity, Writing motivation

By Susan Carter

I’ve just met with a Pacific Island doctoral candidate, let’s call her Vai after the beautiful Pasifika movie that you should try to see. Vai moved me almost to tears by recounting that she does her doctoral writing in the cemetery next to her grandmother’s grave.

Responding to supervisor feedback: do doctoral students have to agree?

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Doctoral writing, Emotion & writing, feedback on writing, Feedback practices, Researcher identity

By Susan Carter

My eight years of being a consultant for doctoral students taught me what supervisors sometimes do not see: that candidates can struggle over whether or not to take supervisory advice. Here, I want to defend two suppositions.

1) It is always wise to pick your battles, and on that assumption, students do well to defer to supervisors when the issues are relatively minor.

2) When writing decisions are important, students need to learn how to refuse advice that they disagree with and demonstrate why.

Because students transition towards independent researcher status when they are able to make decisions and then make them work, academics who support them could initiate talk about how to manage disagreement with supervisors.

Often it is tricky responding to supervisor feedback on writing for candidates who don’t really agree with it. Learning how to negotiate diplomatically is a very useful skill that is not gained lightly. The power differential between student and supervisor can make it quite hard for students to hold on to their own choices. Those who come from a culture where it is inappropriate to contradict a teacher could be advised about Western expectations that there are intellectual benefits to arguing. It’s tricky, though, for many candidates, to disagree.

Voice in doctoral writing: what is it? and can it be taught?

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English language writing skills, Researcher identity, Writing as social identity; the reader as significant other

By Susan Carter

This post reports on a workshop that proved illuminating, leading me to think that closer investigation of voice could be a research project for the future. Are the doctoral students you know conscious of developing their own voices in their writing, or still experimenting to find it, or a bit confused as to what voice actually is? And is this something that as supervisors we are certain about ourselves and can give support for?

It’s not over until it’s over: writing a doctoral graduation citation

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graduation citation, Researcher identity

Today’s guest bloggers, Ana María Benton and Ian Brailsford, write to us from New Zealand. Ana María Benton holds a doctoral degree in education and is a language learning adviser within English Language Enrichment  (Libraries and Learning Services: Te Tumu Herenga) at the University of Auckland. She has long worked with university students and is passionate about language planning, second language education, and language revitalization. Ian Brailsford is an assistant with the University of Auckland’s Specials Collections (Libraries and Learning Services: Te Tumu Herenga) and was previously employed as a postgraduate learning adviser working primarily with doctoral candidates. Here they explain the identity work involved in writing the citation that is read out at New Zealand graduation ceremonies for PhD candidates.

By Drs Ana Maria Benton Zavala and Ian Brailsford

Introduction

This blog post describes the final piece of doctoral writing for a recently awarded PhD: the brief citation read out at graduation. Conventional wisdom is that the thesis abstract is the final (and possibly hardest) piece of writing. At our University, the official guidelines stipulate that abstracts be no more than 350 words. This equates to approximately three to four years’ full-time doctoral study honed down to three to four paragraphs. Good advice on writing the abstract is out there; this post attempts the same for a citation.