PhD Writing Seminar Recap: Maintaining A Scholarly voice

Recently I was invited back to my PhD alma mater to speak with a group of graduate students in an academic writing workshop. This blog post is a condensed summary and reflection on the content I covered with those students.

My appearance in the class was based on the following question, posed on behalf of PhD students who are anxious to get a few early publications under their belts:

“How do you maintain your voice when incorporating feedback from peer reviewers?”

Upon giving the question some thought, I decided I would like to sidestep the question slightly by differentiating between one’s voice and one’s ideas.

Your voice is yours and yours alone. You can’t possibly speak with anything but your voice. This is extremely true for literal speech, with the timbre of your voice determined by anatomical features and life history, but it’s somewhat true for written words as well. Research in computational stylometry shows that there are elements of our prose, like the frequency of word usage and prominence of certain two- or three-word clusters, that are indicative of a personal style, and rather difficult to fake. While many peer reviewers do make comments about our tone, word choice, and the like, they’re not usually talking about the fundamental distribution of words that defines our unique textual fingerprints.

Ideas, on the other hand, are a bit more malleable. At some point in our lives many of us have probably taken a devil’s-advocate position on an issue that we don’t actually believe, just for the sake of discussion (or trolling). To me, the things to be most carefully attended to during the peer review process are not one’s voice, but rather one’s ideas.

Our ideas are precious, but they should not be completely exempt from reconsideration. If you care enough about an idea to submit it for peer review, one could assume that you care about it enough to reconsider it when faced with critique. That’s part of the whole academic enterprise, and if you didn’t want to participate in an open dialogue of ideas, you would probably just churn out polemics for an echo chamber audience on SubStack.

There are times when a reviewer proposes meaningful critiques to your ideas, which have the potential to improve your work. These should be embraced. For example, when I got peer review feedback on early drafts of my forthcoming article on the information practices of conspiracy movement participants like QAnon (more info here), the reviewers encouraged me to make a clearer moral critique of some participants’ extreme behaviors, including such crimes as kidnapping and murder. I knew on a personal level that these actions were well-documented and totally abhorrent, but in the interest of maintaining an impartial academic voice, I hadn’t actually included much discussion about them. A good peer reviewer can prompt us to reconsider our work in productive ways. In this case, setting aside my detached perspective and addressing really ugly subject matter.

On the other side of the coin, there are times when a reviewer poses a challenge to your ideas that doesn’t easily fold into the project you had in mind. If I get feedback like this, I assume that the journal simply isn’t a good fit. If my ideas are worth pursuing, I generally find that someone will be receptive. My recent Journal of Documentation article on preserving algorithms (cowritten with Ciaran Trace) is an example of this. It was initially submitted to a different journal, but the reviewers there didn’t find the ideas to be relevant to their editorial vision. So we moved along and found a more fitting venue.

What about when the reviewer does seem to be criticizing your voice? Sometimes these critiques are just petty, and they are used to cover up the reviewer’s real agenda, which is gatekeeping publication in a particular niche. But it’s tough to know unless you at least try to take their criticism seriously. In cases like this, I would recommend trying to have a colleague read your manuscript. Ideally, this would be a colleague whose writing you admire. Hopefully, they can be honest with you. Is the style getting in the way of the ideas? Are there prose-writing practices that could improve readability? Are the ideas coming through? Sometimes, a few mechanical tweaks can improve readability immensely. Other times, what seems to be a problem with your voice is actually a problem with your ideas. Muddled prose often masks muddled ideas.

As academics, our ideas are our main form of currency. We are not, on the whole, renowned for our gorgeous prose. This means that every sentence should serve a purpose. In our case as academic writers, our writing should prove a point. By focusing on the ideas, and reminding myself that some element of my “voice” will always shine through regardless, I find the review process becomes a lot less intimidating.