A member of our lovely Limitless community messaged me today after reading my post introducing Professor Thomson’s blog to you all. I guess she enjoys spending time looking for blogs on academic writing (don’t we all) and she sent me a link to this website:
http://www.tru.ca/disciplines/eng309/personalvoice.html
This is a website created by two students, Jade Norton and Jasmine Morrison, who studied the effectiveness of incorporating personal voice in academic writing.
Recently, I’ve been looking at other blogs that are similar to mine, just to get some new perspectives. Imagine my joy when I discovered this gem of a blog post written by Professor Pat Thomson of the University of Nottingham:
‘voice’ and the craft of academic writing
This blog post includes the research of anthropologist Kirin Narayan by referring to her book, Alive in the writing. Crafting ethnography in the company of Chekov. In the post, Thomson mentions ways in which writers can develop their own “voice” and the ways including voice will enhance writing.
Thanks to all of you for participating in our survey! In a matter of 5 days, we received responses from a grand total of 21 students and 2 professors! As a token of gratitude, I created this comic with the help of our animator, Jessica Kim. This was inspired by an actual response from one of you and shows the struggle that we are all too familiar with. Please share and enjoy!
An issue that many students face today is being able to balance the expectations of their professors with their own personal voice. It has been ingrained in our minds since grade school that the use of “I” and “we” is only acceptable in personal narratives. John M. Swales, a linguist known for his genre analysis, points out that in regards to audience and participants, an “appropriate role for the authorial persona…requires reflection and negotiation.”
While the audience is a vital aspect of the writing process, the rhetor must remain true to him/herself and express his/her opinions in the way that he/she wishes to, without hesitating because of the intended audience.
So the other day, I came across an interesting paper written by Keith Grant Davies called “Rhetorical Situations and their Constituents.” As I was reading, I started thinking about one of the constituents in particular.
Although the traditional definition of the term has a negative connotation, constraints in a rhetorical situation can be both positive and negative. Constraints are “factors in the situation’s context that may affect the achievement of the rhetorical objectives.” (Grant Davies 272) In plain english, they are features that can hinder or change the success of the discourse by altering how the audience views and feels about the discourse.
Now is there a connection between constraints and the boundaries that we love to talk about? Continue reading →
In this particular context, the boundary we are talking about is not a physical obstacle, but a genre convention. Each genre has its own conventions and its the job of the professor to enforce those conventions. In a way, the professors expect their students to follow the conventions of the genre, which ultimately means that the conventions make up some part of their (the audience’s) expectations. However, oftentimes those conventions (if too strictly implemented) limit students’ creativity and individual voice.
