Finding your voice in academic writing. Some practical considerations

I’ll begin writing my paper this afternoon. I just want to check some final bits of literature before I get going. – This is me speaking to myself, almost every day. I know by now that I get out of this habit only by ignoring any further stuff. Sit down and write, just write! Do what? Write! Yeah, but what exactly? – You think I’m making this up? Yes, that’s the short version. – So what’s going on here? In such moments you’re witnessing the transition between two processes. It’s the move from discovering things to presenting what you think about these things in a paper. It’s in that transition that you have to find your own voice, amidst all the rants in your head, coming out of reading the secondary or even primary literature. Usually though, I don’t find my voice, or certainly not in that moment. Rather I hear all the others, and the feeling grows: I have nothing to say. – In what follows, I want to impart some advice of how you might find your voice. Here is the most important insight right away. I didn’t find it where I was looking for it initially. Unlike I thought, it’s not a matter of style. Rather, style is a result of something else: a result of emphasising those things that matter to you.*

Your voice: what is it anyway? – There is a lot of talk about finding your voice. But what is it anyway? I guess it’s a trademark sound you recognise. Famous musicians or writers of fiction are recognisable by how they play or say something. That suggests that it is a matter of style. But at least in academic writing I think that this is a red herring. Style does not develop out of wanting to sound stylish. Now, I have to tread carefully. Of course, it’s important to check out aspects of style. A good way of learning to write is to try and figure out what exactly you like in other writers and imitate, yes: imitate, that. That’s what I do. Academic writing can be very elegant. And what makes it elegant is that certain writers have found ways of sounding at ease when I would sound cumbersome. Good writers have a way of solving problems of presenting a lot of stuff easily. Imitating such chops helps. But imitating is not sufficient, unless you want to sound exactly like (someone imitating) Fodor or Shakespeare. You have to make it your own. So here are some ideas of how to approach it.

(1) Write an introduction. – Let’s look back at the literature search and the transition to writing a (preliminary) introduction. How do you do it? Now a good introduction tells me a number of things. It sets out

• (a) the general topic;
• (b) a problem arising in scholarly debates (often in line with how it’s discussed in the literature);
• (c) a hypothesis as to how to approach the problem;
• (d) the research question, i.e. the question inquiring about a crucial aspect that needs to be shown for the hypothesis to come out true;
• (e) the methodological approach that justifies the kind of evidence or argument required to answer that question;
• (f) the steps (and restrictions) that need to be taken into account to make the case.

This is a lot, but some things can at least sometimes be done with a single sentence. I’ve addressed some of these items earlier. What’s important for finding your voice is not so much how you go about all the individual points. Rather you need to get just some of these steps under your control. Let me focus on (b) and (f).

What might get you into trouble. ­– I start with (b), because it’s the most obvious point for moving from the literature to your own presentation. Beginners will often present the problem by picking two (or more) pieces from the (secondary) literature and put them in (oppositional) order. So you might write something like this: “Paper A argues thus and so. But thus and so leaves us with the problem of … In the light of this problem, paper B argues that so and thus.” This approach is perfectly fine. You identify a (perhaps long-standing) problem and see how it’s addressed. Then you present these views, probably as an opposition. And then what? Then you think you compare A and B and take a side or you address a problem in paper B and defend your own view, B*. – This is all very well, but it can create various difficulties. One of them is that you will follow the literature very closely in setting out the problem. What I mean is that you’ll probably go along with the emphases of paper B. That is fine if you want to address a certain position in particular. But it doesn’t help you if you want to set out the problem or debate. So here is what you should do.

(2) Labelling positions (in a debate). – Instead of presenting the content of two papers you should present two abstract positions, A and B. How do you abstract away from the papers? By focussing solely on what you think is important for presenting the problem. That means, you don’t follow the twists and turns of the paper. You just pick a claim or concept. Of course, this might seem difficult. But you can figure it out by saying what, for instance, makes the connection to paper B. (You want an example? Look how Putnam introduces the “traditional doctrine” of meaning by summarising Frege in the introduction to The Meaning of “Meaning”. Putnam solely focuses on what he is going to exploit later to make his case.) So your A and B are not authors or papers; they are two positions, isms, types of argument. Labelling positions rather than remaining glued to individual authors has some important consequences. Firstly, you focus on what you think matters. And this means you impose your voice from the very beginning. Your voice is not some afterthought that you present after you mastered the masters. You exercise your voice by pulling the masters your way. They just matter insofar as they are representatives of your set-up of the problem. Secondly, if you introduce a new author, you can just subsume them under one of your own categories. Thirdly, there is no right and wrong in that abstraction. Of course, your way of presenting a position might strike some readers as awkward. Try and see what works. But unlike in the case of presenting an author’s positions, you cannot be unfaithful by changing the emphasis. Of course, you shouldn’t build a straw man. But it’s perfectly fine to justify a somewhat strong characterisation by saying, for example, that you focus on a particular aspect that you deem relevant. Fourthly, you can use these labels throughout your paper. In fact, the aspect that defines the position A or B builds the conceptual repertoire for setting up the drama.

(3) Structuring with labels. – The second step I would recommend is setting out the structure of the paper (f). As suggested above, this often happens by presenting views of opposing authors, and then presenting one’s own idea in the last section. This is often frustrating because, as a writer you have to withhold your own position for long phases, while the reader will want to get to the last chapter to see what your point actually is. However, if you structure your work with the labels you defined in the introduction, your view is present from the get-go. Not in the sense of an own position, but in the sense of your take on what is important about someone else’s position. Your voice informs the writing all the way through. – Now you might worry that this will mean to present someone’s view in a biased way, but this is not the case. Of course, you present an interpretation of someone’s view in any case, but with the labelling strategy you highlight what you find relevant for your purposes. Rather than presenting paper A and paper B … and then seeing how their emphases translate into something that you can refine and discuss as your own adjustment, you will present your take of position A and B. This way, you’re setting up a conceptual space in which you can move around and attribute various positions and distinctions. Your voice is not a particular position, but what shapes the entire space of discussion.** (Once you think like that, you’re no longer tied to presenting A and B as a succession. You might also structure your paper by beginning with your idea, B*. But you do it by setting out B, reference authors that have held B already, and then introduce A as an objection to B, and finally land on B* as the position that addresses that objection.) While doing all that, you can reference and highlight peculiarities in other authors as you go along. But they will speak to the terms of the discussion as you have set them.

So how do you find your voice after long periods of browsing through literature? – I’d reiterate that you find it by focusing, not on something else or something supposedly new, but on what you find important in the text you’re working through. It’s mainly a shift of emphasis: from following what others find important to focusing on what you find important in others. If you look for examples, check out how papers that you like actually build up the problem they work through: I’m sure that more often than not you’ll find that they juxtapose ideas by characterising or labelling positions, while subsuming whole lists of authors under these labels.

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* One afterthought: I now tend to think that this (style being a result of what matters to you) might apply across the board, in writing, music, other arts. But sometimes it’s first necessary to find someone (or some piece of literature etc.) who encourages you to think that the things you find important can actually be said. Can be said, that is, in such and such a way, and without embarrassment. – So it was sometimes only after reading certain authors that I actually dared saying things the way I do now.

If this is correct, the continuous reading in such phases has at least two different functions: you can read (1) to gather content you want to write about or (2) to seek legitimacy for how you want to say things.

** This also means that your view (or what you find important about something) is not necessarily constituted by taking a distinctive or opposing position. Rather your view can be a way of relating or integrating certain positions. (Historians do this much of the time.) All too often, philosophers seem to assume that they have to carve out their view by putting it in opposition to others. There is reason to doubt this, as I argue in a previous post.