ABSTRACT
The phrase ‘writing up’ research gives a hint of the implied hierarchy between oral and written texts, and the privileging of written knowledge over visual and spoken modes of production. This chapter explores such assumptions, through looking at the question of what counts as knowledge and who has authority over it. By taking a perspective on writing as a social practice, constructed in response to specic cultural and institutional contexts, I discuss the challenges of writing across cultures and languages. The analysis draws on interviews conducted recently with postgraduate students based in universities in the UK, Nepal, Korea and Iceland in order to investigate the decisions and strategies they adopted in relation to writing research. In the case of international students, they may already have learned to adapt their writing style and the ways in which they construct an argument to respond to the expectations of their UK or Korean university teachers. When writing about data collected in contexts unfamiliar to their audience, such researchers face additional challenges. Not only do they have to identify and explain diering cultural values and practices, but they also have to develop their authorial voice in relation to the voices of their respondents. This also relates to Alain’s points about ‘explicature’ (‘to make a hearer aware of the cultural assumptions of an utterance’) discussed in Chapter 2.
