Authors: Dr Jingyi Zhu and Dr Zubeida Lowton from University of Glasgow
For all of us working in higher education today, what does it mean to have a voice as a writer? Through the Research Culture and Researcher Development team’s initiative of ‘Write of Spring’, we hosted a half-day session where colleagues attended either a panel session and/or interactive workshop to discuss, explore, and reflect on different approaches to writing with a voice.
In this blog, we reflected on our thinkings and learnings from the session. The blog is also an experiment with co-writing with distinct voices (as indicated by the initials and the italicisation of texts). We hope this is a successful, or at least interesting, writing experiment to read.
A personal journey to author’s voice
ZL: When I started to think about writer’s voice, it is definitely a concept I struggled with especially during my PhD. I was challenged by staying true to the literature but also ensuring I distinguished my own contributions. Over the years, writing seemed more like a challenge than a source of inspiration as I was still trying to figure out what my writer’s voice was. As I progressed into academia professionally, I still grappled with this as I continued to write and explore topics of interest. However, the reality is very different and there are tensions between wanting to write and having the luxury of time to write due to workload commitments and other various deadlines. Ultimately, this is a journey of balancing tensions between time, uncertainty and the need for writing exploration.
JZ: My interest in writer’s voice has been shaped by, for example, questions arising from writing my PhD thesis, reflecting on my English learning journey, and even wondering how to make my academic writing as enjoyable to read as my favourite fiction. When the opportunity offered by the 2026 Write of Spring Festival came along, I instantly pitched the idea to Zubeida. Though we had different journeys leading to our shared interest in writer’s voice, we both envisioned a session not to lecture but to invite our colleagues across career stages and job families to explore the meaning of writer’s voice in the present-day higher education setting together. We hoped to carve out time and space for colleagues to slow down and reflect, a luxury we don’t always have given the multitude of day-to-day tasks we all face.
Using alternative methods to encourage writer’s voice
In the half-day session, we experimented with a range of activities that are perhaps not conventionally associated with ‘writing’.
JZ: I had been very keen to experiment with the use of visual/creative methods in facilitating discussions of writing since the inception of the event idea. I had observed variants of these in colleagues’ teaching practices and, having struck by its emancipatory potential, I designed an artistic activity into the interactive workshop to explore writer’s voice with the medium of collage. My initial worry that the experiment would not be well received was soon squashed, as the participants engaged in the activity enthusiastically, sharing their collages and explaining with great confidence and clarity what they perceived to be their (desired) voices.
ZL: The use of GenAI tools has been a topic of discussion for many in higher education, often with mixed feelings about its appropriate use and application. As a person that is always curious and enthusiastic about the use of various technologies, I was keen to include a workshop activity that explored the use of MS Copilot in developing participants writing voice. We asked participants to prepare a short piece of writing, 6 sentences long which would be used for the activity. We gave participants a prompt to input with their text and reflect on the outputs. To my surprise, this activity was received well once we got over the hurdle of accessing Copilot from various devices.
Take away lessons and some final reflections
ZL: This session that we hosted was only the beginning of engaging in discussions about writer’s voice and reflective practice. Initially, I merely thought of this as an interesting topic and a fun session but from the discussions from panellists and participants, it was very relevant to them and their writing journey. Below are some take-away lessons:
- Jot down what your thoughts in a reflective journal.
- Write down questions and comments you are uncertain about.
- The development of your writer’s voice is fluid and not fixed, which means it will change and that is fine!
JZ: I thought long and hard about the key take home messages, and I think the most crucial point is, surprisingly, knowing that finding our voice is a challenging yet inevitable journey for everyone. We need to be brave to discuss the challenges along the way and allow ourselves the time and space to inspect our practices. Most importantly, we need to keep writing so that we can keep progressing.
