Your voice, measurably

Voice is not decoration

Students hear keep your voice as advice about personality, which makes it sound optional in academic writing. It is not. Voice in an essay is the set of choices that shows a particular person thought about this: which example you reached for, what you found worth objecting to, where you conceded, what you thought was obvious enough to skip.

A marker reading two hundred essays on the same question is looking for exactly that. It is what distinguishes a first from a two-one far more reliably than vocabulary does.

Build a corpus of your own writing

A concrete exercise, and unusually useful. Collect four or five pieces of writing that are unambiguously yours: old essays, long messages, anything written before you used these tools. Read them together and note:

• Sentence length. Do you run long and subordinate, or short and declarative?
• Where your examples come from. Do you reach for history, for numbers, for the everyday?
• Your standard moves. Do you open with a concession? A definition? A specific case?
• Words you actually use. Everybody has a small set of characteristic connectives and qualifiers.
• What you find funny or objectionable. It shows even in formal writing.

Now you have something to compare a draft against, which converts a vague worry into a check you can perform.

A reasonable use of a model, on your own material:

Here are four pieces I wrote. Describe my writing: sentence structure, characteristic constructions, register, how I use examples. Be specific and do not flatter.

Students are frequently surprised. Most people have never had their own prose described back to them.

The tells of generated prose

These are patterns, not proof; this course is clear elsewhere that nobody can reliably detect authorship from text. But as things to remove from your own writing, they are useful:

• Tricolon everywhere. Three-item lists in every sentence, regardless of whether there are three things.
• Uniform paragraph length. Real writing has a paragraph that is two sentences because that was all it needed.
• The balanced summary ending. Ultimately, while X offers benefits, careful consideration of Y remains essential. Says nothing.
• Hedged everything. No sentence commits.
• Abstraction over instance. Claims about various factors and a range of approaches where a specific example belonged.
• Preamble. A first paragraph restating the question before beginning.
• No irregularity. Nothing surprising, no aside, no sentence that took a risk.

The common thread is the absence of a person making choices. That is the thing to add back, and it is also the thing that earns marks.

Register is not vocabulary

A persistent misconception: that academic writing means long words. It does not. Academic writing means precise, and precision often means the plain word.

What academic register actually requires: hedging claims to the strength of the evidence, defining terms you are using in a specific sense, attributing positions to whoever holds them, and being explicit about the logical relationship between sentences. None of that requires utilise or heretofore.

If a model raises your register, check whether it raised your precision. Usually it did not, and inflated vocabulary is easier for a marker to see through than plain prose is.

Reading is how voice develops

The uncomfortable long answer. Your prose is built from what you have read, and if you mostly read generated summaries, that is what your writing will sound like.

So read real writing in your field: actual papers by people known for writing well, and good non-fiction generally. Notice a sentence you like and work out why. That is the whole method, it is slow, and there is no substitute.

Keeping it while accepting help

The practical arrangement, drawn from everything above:

• Write the first version yourself, always. It can be terrible.
• Ask for diagnosis rather than rewriting.
• Accept only changes you can explain.
• After a heavy editing session, read the piece aloud. If it does not sound like you, you accepted too much. Go back to your draft and take fewer changes.

That last check takes two minutes and is the one that keeps a term of assisted editing from slowly converting your prose into everybody’s.