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Here's to Your Voice and Style!

 

Post by Dr Emmanuel Nwosu, a former FHS Writing Lab Consultant.

When it comes to writing in academia, the biggest challenge is finding and clearly expressing your style (self). In the sciences (and especially Health Sciences), there are strict guiding rules for academic writing. Whether it is writing a research proposal, manuscripts for paper publications, policy briefs, portfolios, essays, literature reviews, etc., there are already existing formats and standards. It is often almost impossible to manoeuvre between these standards and introduce your style if you aim to have your piece accepted within the academic community.  

Another challenge is that writing in the Health Sciences often tends to be about creating a “mini” version of the expert. For example, our clients working on research projects may agree with me that by the time your proposal or journal manuscript has undergone several reviews based on a supervisor’s feedback, it tends to have lost your flavour and look more like what your supervisor wrote. Undergraduates who submit essay portfolios often realise that by the time they are submitting their third essays, it doesn’t look like their piece anymore but rather more like what a facilitator, supervisor, or a writing coach (at Writing Lab) wrote depending on who you approach for guidance with your writing  tasks. I must accept that as a writing coach at Writing Lab, we may have helped to perpetuate this as our support sometimes tends to drive clients to follow standard practices that are generally recognized as the “right” way to write.

While I do not disregard the importance of obeying the standard rules of writing in the different genre, we often loose our style and self because we stick to these rules too strictly. I am all for being academic literate and writing according to the specific genre, but academic literacy is also supposed to make you aware of your style. There is the difference it makes, and there is that tinge of excitement that comes with bringing a bit of your own “flavour” into the mix.

That is why today, I have come to ask you, our clients and fellow writers, to find a way to interweave your voice and style into those standard formats of academic writing. We often don’t say it enough in the consultation spaces because each time you meet with us, either online or physically (face-to-face), we are under pressure to get you to see thing from the “right” perspective (academic literacy) within the short time we have with you. So, what you may not have heard enough is that one of the key tenets of academic literacy is finding your ‘voice’ and ‘style’ and being bold enough to put it out there.

As the lockdown due to the COVID-19 pandemic is extending with no end in sight yet, I will encourage you to use this time effectively and be more deliberate about discovering something about yourself that will help your writing go forward. If you ask me, I will suggest that you find your voice and style in writing during this time. Take some time to freestyle a bit, (I have been toying with the idea of starting a blog that has got nothing to do with academic style of writing. It will be just me and my style😊). If we don’t ever put ourselves out there, we may never know that feeling of doing it our way.

Now is you turn, think of what you can do to bring your voice and style into your academic writing. We will be happy to hear from you. Let us know your thoughts and how we can support you in your writing journey during this time. Have a great week further!

Kind regards

Emmanuel Nwosu 

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Emmanuel Nwosu is currently a Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department of Biomedical Engineering in the Faculty of Health Sciences at the University of Cape Town. In addition to his research, Emmanuel is interested in science communication, especially within the public domain. He is passionate about writing and communicating academic research in a simple and clear way that most people will understand. Being aware of his own initial challenges in the academic writing journey, he is driven by the desire to support science writers who are complete “newbies” and those who wish to improve their academic writing skills in order to communicate their research effectively. Hence, academic writing consulting gives him the opportunity to help scientists communicate research effectively and to bring science back to the public domain.

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