Establish your authorial voice

The originality versus convention paradox reflects the differences and tensions between taking in information and putting forward or articulating ideas of your own. When writing you need to find your own individual voice in the midst of other voices, many of which seem more expert and more knowledgeable than your own.

Of course other academic voices do need to be invoked when you write and they do inform and nourish your writing, but they should not drown, smother or sideline the essence of your own contributions. It is perhaps the quest to ‘fill a gap’ in the literature that makes academic writing sometimes feel so daunting, especially in a context where conventional ways of expressing ideas sometimes appear to be rigid and unyielding. How can fresh ideas and new insights be incorporated into a writing style that tends to demand so much conformity?

Murray and Moore

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