The "alternative" methodological approach that I discuss in this paper is one that I suggest can be employed for exploring higher degree research student "becoming," that is, for exploring the relationship between learning, writing and identity or subject formation. This approach is informed by an unlikely amalgam of theoretical framings arising from the broad disciplinary home of sociolinguistics and postmodernist theorisings of subject formation. This apparently uncomfortable combination, however, incorporates a view of "alternative" that references Elizabeth Grosz' use of "difference" to mean elaboration, whereby something can become "more: than itself or "other" than its past while retaining a certain continuity with its past. The approach that I work with in this paper aims to provide such an elaboration--to provide a more nuanced view of what it means to become a postgraduate research writer than would be possible using either of its constitutive theoretical framings alone. (Contains 2 figures and 2 notes.)