Voice features in academic texts – A review of empirical studies

Abstract

The term voice is frequently used in current writing research. This review gives an overview of empirical studies which aimed to identify voice features in academic texts written by students and/or professional writers. The purpose of this article is to show how the understanding of voice and the aims and approaches used in the studies are intertwined. Many studies build on Hyland's (2008) interactional model which has contributed to insights into voice-related issues in academic writing. However, the overemphasis on linguistic features, such as the use of first person pronouns, entails the risk that research on voice ignores content-related features that might be more relevant in the construction of voice. In addition, this review emphasizes the need to relate voice features to the specific context where the writing occurs. The reader-based approach used in the studies by Matsuda and Tardy (Matsuda & Tardy, 2007;Tardy & Matsuda, 2009) or the combination of different methodological tools, as used by Dressen-Hammouda (2014), allows taking into account contextual aspects such as the insider knowledge of the disciplinary community and/or the genre, thus demonstrating how the writer's voice is always embedded in ways of knowledge making and writing traditions.

Raising awareness around writers' voice in academic discourse : an analysis of writers' (in)visibility

“…This study argues that there are conceptual blurred boundary lines, concretely between stance and voice, that should undoubtedly be established so to approach and interpret writers' voice and their consequent visibility. While scholarly disputes have tried to cast light onto this grey area (John 2005;Charles 2004Charles , 2007Tardy 2012;Hyland and Sancho 2012;Dressen-Hammouda 2014;Stock and Eik-Nes 2016) this study understands voice in Med-RAs as a tool to build objectivity and credibility. As introduced above, the effect created by the linguistic features associated with the notion of voice reveal what the writer seems to own: a process, ideas or knowledge (John 2005).…”

“…One of the most prolific strands of research based on the concept of writers' identity in Applied Linguistics focuses on the academic writers' construction of that identity (cf. Stock and Eik-Nes 2016). In this avenue of research, awareness has been raised about the issue of the real self and the artificial imposed identities adopted in writing.…”

“…

This paper aims to contribute to the study of the concept of writer's visibility inspired by approaches to the analysis of identity in written discourse (see Ivanič 1998, Charles 1999and John 2005. The way medical academic writers selfrepresent themselves in their research articles can be seen in terms of a gradable visibility cline crafted and constrained by the academic genre expectations of these texts (Swales and Feak 2004;Stock and Eik-Nes 2016). Traditionally, authorial visibility has been studied within frameworks such as evaluation, authorial voice and stance.

…”

Academic voice: On feminism, presence, and objectivity in writing

“…Voice is embedded in the social (Ivanič, ; Lea & Street, ; Paxton, ; Stock & Eik‐Nes, ), political (Leggatt‐Cook, ), gendered (Fleischman, ; Leggatt‐Cook, ), and cultural (Lea & Street, ; Stock & Eik‐Nes, ) milieu of power relations (Elbow, ; Fleischman, ; Paxton, ) present in academic writing. The objective rigidity of academic voice has its origins in the positivist traditions of science (Fleischman, ; Lillis & Turner, ; Ryan, Walker, Scaia, & Smith, ).…”

“…Voice is embedded in the social (Ivanič, 1998;Lea & Street, 1998;Paxton, 2012;Stock & Eik-Nes, 2016), political (Leggatt-Cook, 2010), gendered (Fleischman, 1998;Leggatt-Cook, 2010), and cultural (Lea & Street, 1998;Stock & Eik-Nes, 2016) milieu of power relations (Elbow, 2007;Fleischman, 1998;Paxton, 2012) present in academic writing.…”