This chapter demonstrates how the surface features of academic writing may vary enormously depending on culture and ideology. The chapter highlights non-mainstream instances of genre, which exhibit a small number of shared features or family resemblances to the mainstream instances of genre of the culture. By analysing various possible instantiations of genre, this chapter adds to the account given in Chap. 5 in that shared knowledge determines conceptualisation of academic writing. Overlapping conceptualisations and prototypicality effects are displayed. It is identified that conceptualisation of research as a journey occupies a dominant place in the mainstream academic discourse community, and this becomes an anchor for variations of genre to emerge in the mainstream community.