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Variation in academic discourseRecent insights into academic writing have shown considerable variation in text characteristics across fields, languages, and cultures. Major as well as subtle differences were noted in style preferences, and on various levels of form and content organization. A number of such discoursal phenomena are discussed in this volume, and ample evidence can be found in other sources in the area of research into academic communication patterns.Among the most notable differences are field-and culture-bound disparities in global organization schemata of texts. These include divisions within text space, their labeling and sequencing. Texts have been found to vary in the degree of explicitness and metadiscoursal guidance as to what meanings have been, are, or will be communicated. They have been shown to differ in redundancy levels and in the amount of background that is sanctioned in establishing relevance relations between ideas. Differences in the use of structural resources and rhetorical devices have also been pointed out.If experimental sciences are prone to show more similarities in textualization patterns, writings in the humanities and social sciences evidence more prominent variation. In these research fields, communication styles respond most strongly to language-and culture-bound discoursal preferences and constraints. It is this kind of academic discourse we will focus on in the following discussion of the human properties behind variable text characteristics.

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The paper addresses the discourse domains of academic writing in English and Polish using the example of school writing. The English argumentative‐expository essay is related to its potential counterpart in Polish. Incongruencies between the two genre prototypes are examined in terms of cultural emphases, text characteristics and educational traditions. An integrated approach is adopted in which user‐centered and text‐centered parameters are correlated. To drive the issue home, an empirical project was devised in which Polish students were asked to perform a task that subverted the regular expectations of school writing in their native tongue.