Despite their long history and wide-spread use, the private writing techniques of journaling and freewriting remain largely underexploited in the field of academic writing instruction. They are seen only as forms of pre-writing, and are criticised by some for being under-theorised, vague and asocial. Contextualizing them within a writing-as-social-practice approach, and drawing on a conceptual framework including a notion of looking-away developed by Derrida, Vygotsky’s conception of learning development, and Ivanic’s notion of writer identity, this paper aims to throw new light on these private writing techniques and argues they can be transformational in developing students’ learning and identity, as well as written and non-written outputs. In this paper we theorise these practices through reflection on two instances of teaching in which they played an important part. The teaching interventions were in different disciplinary contexts (Architectural Design and Natural Sciences), with writers of different levels of expertise/competence (undergraduate and PhD), in both L1 and multilingual settings. In both interventions, we found that these private writing techniques were transformational due to the space they allowed writers to self-reflect, and to look away from their public-facing outputs. The techniques provided significant developmental benefits and moved the students along a continuum towards a more expert-like identity.

Achieving publication in Anglophone science journals is a goal of many multilingual scholars, and failure can have huge implications for individuals’ future careers and for the global dissemination of scientific knowledge. Despite the importance of the topic, there is still a lack of bottom-up research, which investigates the experience of writing for publication in English from the perspective of the novice scholar. This article presents the case of ‘Rolli’, a German-L1 novice scholar facing the challenge of writing his first article for publication as the lead author and writing it moreover in English. The study uses text history, interviews, and feedback comments to portray the socially-situated story of a novice multilingual writer on a trajectory to successful publication. The case shows how peer feedback was pivotal in achieving publication. Rolli’s ability to respond to this feedback was a key success factor in the writing for publication process. The case sheds light on the importance of peer feedback in disciplinary writing.

Failure to publish articles in the dominant Anglophone scientific journals has implications for multilingual scholars’ future careers and for the global dissemination of scientific knowledge. Despite the importance of this topic, there have been few studies of the perceptions of multilingual scholars engaged in this process. In an effort to close this gap, an online questionnaire was emailed to 153 German-L1 scholars at the ETH Zurich, Switzerland. The 46 respondents ranked 'writing reader-friendly texts' as their number one problem in writing scientific publications in English, followed by 'using correct grammar'. Reader-friendliness was defined by the majority of the respondents as 'writing in a clear and simple style'. The questionnaire also revealed some interesting differences between the views of novice and more experienced scholars regarding the role of different sources of feedback in helping them overcome these problems. The results from the questionnaire will be explored in more detail in follow-up interviews.