Publishing research in a second language: The case of Sudanese contributors to international medical journals

This paper compares published writing produced by British and Sudanese medical researchers. Twenty research articles were examined, 10 by British and 10 by Sudanese writers. All had been published in highly regarded international journals. As expected, all 20 articles conformed to editorial requirements and followed the conventional IMRD structure to a large extent. Differences were noted in the realisation of these components, however, and particularly in the discussion section where the reported findings were interpreted in terms of their significance and relevance. The British and Sudanese writers differed in their use of hedging, and the British writing made far greater use of nominalisation, both to express authorial disinterestedness and to realise processes and attributes in a more succinct way. Such variations are subtle and may not be immediately obvious to the reader, but could usefully inform the content of academic writing courses in Sudanese medical schools.