Using editing to find your scholarly voice in your PhD thesis

I’m guessing that you have probably spent quite some time working on your doctoral dissertation. You’ll likely have draft chapters – probably your literature review or methods chapters – that you wrote possibly a few months ago, or possibly a few years ago. You’ve been doing a lot of writing in the time since, and you have likely developed a slightly different writing ‘voice’ – you have become a more experienced writer with all the practice you’ve been doing, and that will show in the way you write.

This is normal and it shows that you have grown as a writer and a researcher. But it can be distracting and disorientating for the reader if there isn’t a consistent authorial ‘voice’ that comes through from the beginning of the introduction to the end of the conclusion. (Remember that consistency is one of the key things we look at in the editing process.)

So, the first step in the substantive editing process for me when I’m getting to the end of a large project (like a PhD dissertation) is to go back to the chapters I wrote first and make sure everything still sounds like me.

What this looks like will be different for different people, because our scholarly writing voices all develop differently. Over the course of writing my PhD thesis, my writing voice became more informal; earlier versions of my chapters were much less conversational and felt more stilted. So when I went back to try to make the voice consistent throughout, I found myself rewriting quite a lot of my lit review and methodology sections, not so much in terms of content as much as how I was expressing myself. By the end of my doctorate (with all those hours of thesis writing under my belt!), I’d found my writing style and so a large part of the revising and refining process was getting all the chapters to sound the same.

Of course, going from a more formal writing voice to a less formal one might not be appropriate for either your discipline or your topic; thanks to all the reading you’ve done, you now have a very good sense of how other people working in your area write, and you want to keep that in mind as you do this process of making your writing voice consistent. Talk to your supervisor if you have any doubts about how you should be pitching your work in terms of voice and language (particularly because the way I wrote my dissertation and book was done in a very specific context and it isn’t a way of writing that is appropriate in every case).

But in essence, what you want to do here is to make your dissertation read as though you sat down yesterday to write it and wrote it in one go. (I hope this goes without saying, but just in case, this is not an advisable approach for writing a solid dissertation, and definitely not one I am advocating. Even just thinking about it makes me feel itchy and anxious.)

You don’t want the reader to be able to see your development as a writer as they read through your thesis; you want there to be a consistent voice that runs throughout.

In your read-through for voice, then, what you want to do is pick up on where needs some more polishing from a consistency perspective. Is there anything that reads ‘differently’ from the later chapters that you wrote? (It’s often the conclusion, and perhaps the introduction if you’re anything like me – I hate writing these bits and always leave them until I can’t avoid them any more!) The question you want to keep asking yourself is: How would you write this if you were writing the chapter today? The other thing you want to keep an eye out for is language. Here I’m not thinking about whether language is ‘correct’ or not per se. It’s more a case of: is there a way to express this idea that will make it easier for my reader to understand? You can (should) develop a scholarly voice in academic writing that is still accessible. There’s a good reason to do this at the editing stage:

 People tend to write more formally and use jargon more often in their earlier writing, and as they write more and become more confident in their skills as researchers and writers, their writing often becomes a bit clearer with simpler language.

One thing I would strongly advocate for is using plain English where you can. This isn’t a question of formality or informality, but rather about clarity. I caution against using big words that sound fancy just for the sake of using big words that sound fancy. And it’s actually harder to explain complicated ideas using simple language than it is to use academic-speak. So, if you can see from your read-through that your language has become less complex in your more recent chapters, I would urge you to lean into that and rework your other chapters to be as accessible as they can be.

In terms of making the language as readable as possible, the best thing you can do is swap your dissertation with another student – even better if they aren’t in your discipline! – and get them to tell you what bits make sense and what bits need more work. (And then you do the same for them). Learning how to give and receive this kind of feedback is invaluable, so once you’ve had a read of your dissertation and made it as clear as you think it can be, see if another pair of eyes might help identify any other tweaks you can make.

Beyond these tips, though, there isn’t a great deal of step-by-step instruction I can give when it comes to checking for a consistent voice because it will be different in every dissertation and for every author. The best I can offer is that you know your writing style and scholarly ‘voice’ best of all and are well-placed to spot when it doesn’t sound quite like you. Listen to what your writing/editing/organising/stylistic intuition is trying to tell you.