Academic writing and publishing is conducted in several sets of forms and genres. This article provides a short summary of the full spectrum of critical & academic writing and lists the genres of academic writing. It does cover the variety of critical approaches that can be applied when one writes about a subject. However, as Harwood and Hadley (2004) and Hyland (2004) have pointed out, the amount of variation that exists between different disciplines may mean that we cannot refer to a single academic literacy.