How do you express 'your voice' academically?
It is not sufficient to write:
- I think that...
- I believe that...
- I agree with...that...
- I think it is...
Yes, these are examples of 'your voice', but when expressed using the personal pronoun 'I', it tends to give a subjective tone to the writing.
Academic writing needs to be objective.
Academic writing needs to be supported by authors and their research. In other words, academic writing needs citations throughout to provide validity and reliability to the statements.
In summary, academic writing needs to be:
- objective in tone
- supported with citations
- inclusive of 'your voice'
Your document cannot be just pages of citations, either direct or indirect; it must have 'your voice' represented.
There are many ways of expressing 'your voice' in academic writing. Over the page is one example: An Activity. It is a piece about writing clearly.
At the end of the paragraph, you will have an opportunity to feed 'your voice' into the paragraph. In addition, three questions will be asked for you to reflect upon:
- Where did you integrate 'your voice'?
- How did you integrate 'your voice'
- Why did you integrate 'your voice' this way?