Find your own voice
By Dave Harris

Academic writing is about finding new information and new ways of seeing problems. The dissertation, the Master's thesis, and, in fact, most, if not all, works for publication, are works whose value lies in finding innovative ways of looking at and understanding problems.

The place to start is by writing down what you know and what you suspect. If you want to get your written project done sooner than later, start writing now, and start by writing down your ideas. The sooner your own ideas are on paper, the sooner you can begin to reflect on your position, and see how to build it as an academic argument.

The first step in finding your own voice is to identify, as clearly as possible, what you think. How do you see the world? And what questions do you have about it?

Very often, I work with people who believe, for one reason or another, that they need to do more research, and that they don't know enough to write a good dissertation. And sure, who has read everything available on a subject? Most of us don't have time to track down and read everything relevant to our topic.

There is a problem with continual reading: it is the absorption of the voices of others. With each new article and book we read, we find a new voice to follow, new ideas to try to absorb. Unless we are making a specific concerted effort to incorporate each new piece of research into our own coherent worldview, it is easy to end up following each new author. Or at the least reacting to someone else's view, rather than refining our own.

Until we try to put them down in words, our philosophies, beliefs and perspectives have an unresolved and undefined quality. Maybe our thoughts have never been formulated in words, or maybe the words we've used are different than the language we speak or write, but until we put our thoughts down in words on the page, we have not begun to develop our own voice.

My own experience of writing, even of writing a short essay, is that I don't know what I want to say. I have ideas; I have a general aim, some intention belief or interest that I want to capture on the page, a goal. But as I write, I learn. The ideas shift; some work well on paper, others not so well. The very choices of words and phrasing often alter how I understand a project.

This is why I write multiple drafts. It is not because the first draft is necessarily bad; it is because in writing the first draft I have learned how to do it better. And so I start with a fresh page with a new clearer vision of where I'm going.

This clearer vision of where I'm going then guides my research efforts. I read with purpose; with a sense of what I'm looking for. My research is no longer simply aimless exploration of a territory, it becomes a process of testing perspectives; in particular it is a process of testing my own vision to see its strengths and weaknesses. My research ceases to be a piecemeal set of responses to the work of others, and becomes a process of developing new ideas and perspectives. Thus the process of writing, and of finding our own voice, can actually help us with the entire project, including the research, which we may be using as an excuse to keep from writing.

Dave Harris, Ph.D., academic writing coach and editor, helps writers rework their writing process, fine-tune their final drafts, and everything in between (www.thoughtclearing.com; dave@thoughtclearing.com).
Copyright © 2007, Dave Harris. All rights reserved