Writing Differently about Scholarly Issues: Defending Our Voices and Inviting the Reader

Abstract

Abstract This paper addresses an ethical issue which comes into play when a scholar sits down to write an article. It concerns rhetorical strategies traditionally employed in top-tier academic journals, specifically in business and management, which efface a unique authorial voice and are reader exclusive. To reclaim authorial voice and embrace the reader’s presence in text construction, we propose approaching scholarly writing as a dialogue between the writer and the reader, an emotional engagement which includes aspects of the notion of ‘tenderness’ coined by Olga Tokarczuk (2019, 2020). Writing with tenderness enables authors to engage with readers in a way that helps them unite fragments of text into a single coherent design. Because in our digitalised and globalised world, there is a lack of universal values the writer could draw on to craft arguments convincing for the reader, we need to search for new ways to narrate our lives. Our approach involves the inclusion of what Tokarczuk (2019) calls ‘structures of mythology’ which are conceived of as values fundamental for human lives and allow for a wide range of content-dependent interpretations. Incorporating aspects of ‘tenderness’ in the process of text production will have important impact on the utility, accessibility, relevance, quality and global reach of scholarly writing.