The aim of this study was to examine ways in which High School Students approach academic writing. Both discursive and critical-analytical levels in 21 PM-texts and 14 investigating literary essays were analyzed through a genre theoretical and sociocultural framework in order to widen the understanding of students’ usage of explicit textual and interpersonal markers as well as their techniques of writing abstracts. The results showed that nearly 25 percent of the putative abstracts consisted of sampled and reshaped text sequences. The majority of these were on the other hand results of a creative process in which the students reshaped utterances from different sources. The results also showed that the essays in some aspects were subjective reviews rather than objective academic texts, but also constituted by both strategic and academic language actions. The PM-texts were in some ways products of the "old" school genre argumentative texts where explicit metatextual commentaries and language actions were relatively absent. The ways in which the students approach academic writing is therefore depending on how they perceive different school genres.