The term academic writing refers to the forms of expository and argumentative prose used by university students, faculty, and researchers to convey a body of information about a particular subject.

And also based on our research, Academic writing refers to a particular style of expression that researchers use to define the intellectual boundaries of their disciplines and their areas of expertise. Characteristics of academic writing include a formal tone, use of the third person rather than first person perspective (usually), a clear focus on the research problem under investigation, and precise word choice like specialist languages adopted in other profession, such as, law or medicine, academic writing is designed to convey agreed meaning about complex ideas or concepts for a group of scholarly experts. 

(Bazerman 1988) are refracted through the politics of language and location. Our aim in this book is to explore this refraction, drawing on two disciplinary fields: psychology and education. These are important fields for exploring the politics of location for a number of reasons. Epistemologically, in many ways, both disciplinary fields reflect the complex and contested nature of academic knowledge building in the twenty-first century, facing towards natural sciences, social sciences and the humanities (see discussions for example in Nisbet 2005; Stainton-Rogers 2004), including the rhetorical practices associated with a range of intellectual traditions.


 In addition, both psychology and education have an applied dimension which firmly situates research within local contexts while at the same time (often) drawing on theoretical discourses that aspire to universality. A focus on these disciplinary areas therefore foregrounds complex questions about which kinds of knowledge can be most usefully circulated where, and how locality connects with knowledge evaluation systems operating globally. In their trajectories towards publication, not only do texts move translocally – shifting from one location to another – the evaluation systems within which they travel also shift. Exactly how texts are evaluated as they travel is crucial in the high stakes game of academic writing for publication, in particular article publication.