Facilitating sustained dialogic engagement in writing groups to support postgraduates’ research-based writing can be challenging. So far there is little research on dialogic strategies in such groups. Studies of tutor-student talk around texts highlight that different dialogic strategies can invite or exclude contributions. This article investigates how writing group participants negotiate different perspectives on academic writing practices in a multidisciplinary writing group. The study analyses six recorded meetings of multilingual master’s students writing in English at a Swedish university. It identifies dialogue patterns with diverging or converging perspectives, where students refer to a range of universal or discipline-specific norms. Reference to a generic yet unspecific norm creates a space for sharing diverging perspectives while reflecting on ones’ own writing. Applying perceived universal norms to others’ texts can close down dialogue. Awareness of dialogue patterns can help facilitators to decide when to step back and when to step in as moderators.

Humanities departments across European universities have established an increasing number of interdisciplinary, international master’s programmes that culminate in thesis projects. Yet, the challenges of such interdisciplinary research-based writing have been largely neglected in EAP research. This article investigates how postgraduate students in interdisciplinary fields express and develop genre knowledge during an EAP course for Humanities students preparing for their thesis writing. In two case studies, the article qualitatively explores students’ perspectives on their writing along the related dimensions of disciplinary positioning and genre knowledge. Students’ explicit expressions of such knowledge in course tasks and interviews are analysed. In addition, students’ research-based writing is compared to trace manifestations of this knowledge. The results highlight the students’ use of individual reference points to evaluate writing within their heterogeneous research fields. In terms of their research-based writing, the cases illustrate two related trajectories, namely, the development from writer to topic focus and the combination of themes into a coherent argument. Tracing the textual developments reveals the significance of mapping interdisciplinary studies on the interrelated epistemological, thematic and discoursal levels in postgraduate writing. Developing an awareness of these levels requires an understanding of the situatedness of postgraduates’ writing in interdisciplinary, departmental and biographical contexts.