Developing Your Voice

 Some years ago, I was the examiner at a mock viva.  The PhD had many strengths and the student, earnest and hard-working, was very clearly knowledgeable and had a good grasp of methodology and methods.  I was therefore struck by how little analysis there was in the literature review.  I read it several times in advance of the viva, seeking to be generous, but there was no escaping the conclusion: the literature review had not done its job. It was not an argument that established why the research question needed to be asked but a series of randomly ordered encyclopedia entries on topics that related, in greater or lesser degrees, to the student's subject.  My recommendation would be that there was still another 3-6 months of work to do in order to redeem the literature review.  The other reviewer picked up on the same issue, and I have always remembered her comments: Where are you in this literature review? Where is your critical voice? 

That got me to thinking.  Putting myself in the student's shoes, I wondered how you could begin to take action on comments like these.  What does it mean to be in your literature review? How could you go home and say to yourself, Right. I have to put myself in the literature review.  So how do I do that? And what do they mean by critical voice? Should I add an evaluative comment every time I mention a source? Won't that take me over the word count?

And so we can see how feedback on a literature review, which is valid and really does go to the heart of the issue, only makes sense if you already know what you are doing.  When the purpose of the literature review is not well understood from the start, addressing such feedback can make the literature review worse rather than better.  You could spend the 3 to 6 months doing your best to follow the advice, and be very clear in your account of how you addressed it.  You could list all the evaluative comments you added and say that this was how you displayed your critical voice.  But this wouldn't really address the issue, and the new examiner is likely to say something like The review is mostly descriptive with seemingly random pieces of evaluation scattered throughout.  And, even though we are taught that academic writing should not be personal, you could seek to put more of yourself in your review by switching to the first person singular and peppering your account with I think, I believe, in my opinion, as I see it, and so on (Well, that was what the examiner meant, wasn't it?).  And even though we are taught that academic writing should be appropriately hedged, you could take out all the careful hedging you put in (this could indicate; it might be concluded that; studies in general have shown) and add intensifiers so that you can assert your views with strength (Well, more of me has to be in the review so I guess this works. That's what the examiner wanted, wasn't it?).  You could go through and convert all your passive voice clauses into active ones, and so on*.  And as with the evaluative comments, you could document all of this and say Here are all the ways I put myself into my literature review. But this would still not fix the issue.  Such features may or may not occur.  And they may or may not be appropriate. But they are not really how you express your critical voice in a literature review.  While it is all very well to use assertive language, your assertive style will not score you many points if the point you are asserting is invalid or irrelevant.     

The problem with these changes, carefully made and faithfully documented thought they may be, is that they just address surface features.  Your critical voice does not come from surface features.  You cannot magic it up in an editing session.  Your critical voice, the you in your literature review, comes from making a rock solid argument.  Don't describe every source you've read. Come to grips with what each of the sources has found.  Make a list of the findings.  Write each finding on an individual index card (yes, you can still buy these in shops) and then start looking for patterns and trends.  Sort your cards.  How do these patterns and trends in previous work add up to the need to ask your research question?  Does your analysis of previous work show that lots of studies do too much of one thing, but not enough of other things?  Or maybe it shows that some tantalizing findings that relate to your topic have emerged but they are all from small-scale studies with fewer than 5 participants?  Make your case.  Once you have your argument and the evidence for it nailed down, you will have found your critical voice, your particular take on what it is about previous work in your field that means your research question needs to be asked.  And at that point, you will know where you need to hedge, where you need to intensify, where the passive voice is warranted, and where it is not.  You will know if it is okay to use the first person or not. And you won't be wondering what it was that the examiner wanted because you know your argument and you are now in a position to defend it. You are the author. 

* Use of the first person, strong commitment to assertions, use of the action voice, and minimal hedging are all features that rank highly in a scale of voice intensity developed Helms-Park and Stapleton (Helms-Park, R. and Stapleton, P. 2003. 'Questioning the importance of individualized voice in undergraduate L2 argumentative writing: An empirical study with pedagogical implications'. Journal o of Second Language Writing. 12 (3): 245-265).