Achieving a Voice of Authority in PhD Theses

Abstract

The doctoral thesis is the highest form of assessed student writing in the sphere of British higher education. While it can vary greatly in form, tone, epistemology and purpose across disciplines, which makes it difficult to generalize features, a common point is that candidates have to be persuasive. To convince examiners that they are worthy of the award of a doctorate, their texts need to meet a twofold rhetorical challenge: firstly, they must project a voice of individual expert authority through the developing text, and, secondly, they must also position themselves in relation to their thesis subject and ultimately within a disciplinary community. They must, in sum, achieve both a distinct voice and a distinct stance. In this chapter I will discuss notions of voice and stance in relation to PhD theses, adopting the broad definition of ‘voice’ put forward by Matsuda (2001: 40): ‘Voice is the amalgamative effect of the use of discursive and non-discursive features that language users choose, deliberately or otherwise, from socially available yet everchanging repertoires; it is the overall impression.’ In other words, ‘voice’ derives from a range of aspects of the text, both linguistic and non-linguistic.