This chapter investigates potential differences between English abstracts written by Brazilian graduate students vis-à-vis those taken from published papers. The primary purpose is to compare the frequencies of lexical items which are typically used in academic discourse. The study then takes a step further and examines the lexico-grammatical patterns of three selected lemmas – PRESENT, FIND and SHOW. The data are drawn from two independent and separate corpora. One corpus is made up of 189 abstracts (40,278 words) written by master’s and PhD students from the disciplines of physics, computing and pharmaceutical sciences. The other corpus comprises 1,086 abstracts (187,619 words) taken from papers published by various leading academic journals from the same disciplines. Significant differences were found between student and published writing in relation to both frequency and lexico-grammatical patterns. The chapter concludes with a discussion on the application of the findings into pedagogic practice.