The construction of authorial voice in thesis writing: a multidimensional comparative perspective

Constructing appropriate authorial voices through in-text citations is the basis for quality academic writing. Writers are required to distinguish a variety of other voices presented in academic writing, including their own, and to maintain effective control over them. Voice construction has been widely studied, but little attention is given to the examination of novice writers. To fill this gap, this study aims to conduct a multidimensional exploration of masters’ citation usages and the construction of authorial voices in terms of citation forms, reporting markers and citation distributions. For this purpose, a corpus of 20 Chinese master theses in Applied Linguistics and a corpus of 20 published research papers have been constructed, all written in Chinese and totaling one million Chinese characters. Findings revealed that, compared with experts’ use of citations, novice writers employed significantly more citations in Research Background while less in the Main Body section. In each section, novices used significantly more“author as subject”forms to list the cited sources without conveying any evaluation while using fewer non-integral forms, which led to the authorial voice being drowned out by the cited authors’ voices. Both novices and experts often used research markers and expressed neutral evaluation, and the evaluation in Chinese academic writing was usually not communicated via reporting markers directly. This study provides a dynamic view of citation practices of novice writers and also sheds new insights on the study of academic writing in Chinese.