Researchers from France and the US compared grids for analyzing academic texts, to explore similarities and differences and to raise questions to each other. The analysis focused on two US and three French grids for analyzing students’ and scholars’ academic texts. The comparative work makes it possible to shed light on fairly fundamental choices in terms of the relationship to the norm, to evaluation, to prescription, and to description; in terms of the constitution of data, the elaboration of units of analysis, and processing tools; and in terms of the theoretical foundations of methodological choices, the modalities of the comparative approach.