A response to Matsuda and Tardy’s “Voice in academic writing: The rhetorical construction of author identity in blind manuscript review”

In a recent article in ESP, Matsuda and Tardy (2007) investigate the role of voice in academic writing via a simulated blind manuscript review process. Based on their findings, they claim that voice does play a role in such writing, and call for further research into the issue of the reader’s construction of authorial identity. Matsuda and Tardy’s study appears to have been triggered in part by articles we wrote several years ago (Helms-Park and Stapleton, 2003 and Stapleton, 2002) in which we discussed the extent to which voice should be considered as a pedagogical tool in L2 undergraduate writing. In this rejoinder, we call into question Matsuda and Tardy’s characterization of our earlier work and also comment on their research methodology while further focusing on the qualities of voice which continue resonating with writing researchers.