Professional writing as institutional norm and personal style

The study is based on 85 inspection reports in primary schools, composed during the 2010–2011 academic year by six National Education Inspectors in an academy in Brittany, France. Our main objective is to describe the genre of the report in a text statistics framework, using both extralinguistic (enunciative situation, pragmatics) and linguistic characteristics. Among the results we obtained, we noted that the reports were significantly grouped together by author. In spite of significant compositional and generic constraints, strengthened by the report model recommended for use by the Academy, some authors clearly distinguished themselves from the others and this allowed us to consider "personal styles" of writing for these administrative reports.