I Can Hear Your Voice: That’s How I Spot Borrowed and AI Writing
One of the ways I work as an editor is to get to know you as a writer. Every writer has a voice, even in academic writing, and it is usually comprised of signature phrases, typical sentence and paragraph constructions, word choices, styles of hedging, and other mechanisms that are unique to you as a person. Usually by the end of the first chapter, I can “hear” you, and when the voice in your writing suddenly drifts out of your typical style, I become concerned about plagiarism and AI-generated writing. I do not accuse you of anything; I simply start to ask if this part of your text is still in your own voice. I flag it for you because if I can “hear” you, so can all of the other people who will read your work. Your writing is like a fingerprint: unique to you, and when someone else’s fingerprints are present, most readers notice.
Your writing fingerprint is personal to you: no two writers share the same one. Your writing voice has a cadence, just like your speaking voice, and when your normal rhythm suddenly changes, then shifts back again, an attuned reader will pick up on that. Like not being able to hear your own speaking voice, most academic writers may not realize they have a writing voice that shapes how they communicate their ideas on the page. This is not to say that your writing voice cannot change and evolve, but that sudden changes in it can be a tell that the writing is not your own. Remaining in your own consistent voice throughout the piece increases its trustworthiness and dependability, and a good editor can help you strengthen your writing voice and eliminate places where it veers off track. I help you find the seams where your voice stops, and another’s begins.
A good editor helps polish your work so you sound more like yourself, not less. My work involves pointing to passages, phrasings, and other word-level details so that authors can clearly state what they mean, in their own voice and words, to maintain academic and personal integrity throughout the writing itself. When I notice something not in your own voice, I flag it as a seam where your voice ends and another begins. Plagiarism is often unintentional. Sometimes, a paraphrase goes badly because a writer is tired or a quotation mark goes missing during a paste. My ability, as your editor, to hear your voice allows me to point out to you when it shifts into someone else’s in these often unintentional ways. This protects your actual voice and writing and your integrity, too. Software plagiarism checks cannot do what I am describing—it takes another human to hear your voice in your writing. And this is why AI-generated text is so easy for me to notice—I hear its “voice” right away, too.
AI-generated text in particular has a sound: it tends to use many words and not actually convey much meaning; it is fond of pet phrases and certain sentence constructions, and is very uniform. There is little nuance; the register does not change, and the human hedges and bridges tend to disappear in AI writing. It also repeats ideas without building on an argument, which can be fatal in academic writing. I’d rather see a human writer make a writing mistake than read error-free but meaningless AI prose. The mistake reveals the writer as integral and honest.
Honesty is important in academic writing, but as I stated above, things sometimes happen in the production of academic prose that are unintentional. If I notice your voice has shifted in a piece I am editing for you, I will not accuse you or call the academic writing police. Instead, I will just leave you a query: Hey, this does not sound like you. Let’s check this for unintentional plagiarism or AI-generated text. And then I leave it at that—you are an adult, and your integrity is yours to manage. My job is to strengthen and highlight your already strong academic writing voice, and I say this because it is your voice, and the more you realize that, the stronger it will be. Because your voice is your strongest asset.
Your academic writing voice becomes the voice of your work throughout your career. It is how your contributions sound, how your unique perspective and experience inform that sound, and this is why honing and protecting it is part of your academic writing life. Sometimes our voice gets overwritten: by some software program, a careless editor, a colleague. One thing to try from this blog post right away is to compare some of your own writing samples with AI-generated text or text written by another academic source.
Try this: fifteen minutes with three voices
Take 10 or 15 minutes to do this exercise. Grab some of your own writing, some from an AI, and some from a source you’ve relied on in the past, all on the same topic. Read all three aloud. As you read, mark any specific hedging phrases you may use, the AI uses, or your source uses; specific phrases, and the length of the sentences. Comparing your own writing to other sources in this way helps you hear your voice as well as those of the AI and other authors.
So bring me your voice. I will help you keep it, and keep it yours.
Warmly,
~Jennifer