M ANY AMERICANS REGARD BRITISH ENGLISH as more formal and proper than American English, while the British in turn consider American English to be markedly informal and relaxed. Observers commonly attribute these attitudes to differences in pronunciation, which are the most readily apparent distinctions between the two dialects. Correspondingly, nearly all linguistic comparisons of British and American English have focussed on phonological features and relatively idiosyncratic vocabulary differences. Syntactic differences between the two varieties have been largely ignored. The present study begins to fill this gap: it identifies systematic syntactic differences between British and American writing, and it suggests that these differences are associated with differing functional priorities. The study compares nine written genres (e.g., press reportage, academic prose, romantic fiction) in British and American English with respect to three underlying parameters of linguistic variation (identified in earlier studies). Based on their functional interpretations, these parameters have been tentatively labelled Dimension 1: INTERACTIVE versus EDITED TEXT; Dimension 2: ABSTRACT Versus SITUATED CONTENT; and Dimension 3: REPORTED versus IMMEDIATE STYLE. (These interpretations are described in section II.) The present study shows that there are systematic linguistic differences between British and American writing with respect to the first two of these dimensions. When the genres are compared along Dimension 1, it is found that the British genres are consistently more edited and less interactive than the corresponding American genres; along Dimension 2, the British genres are consistently less abstract than the corresponding American genres. Although these differences are not large, they are highly systematic across the different genres, indicating that they truly represent underlying linguistic differences between British and American written texts. The study suggests that the differences along both dimensions are associated with greater attention to grammatical and stylistic prescriptions in British than American writing. The discussion is organized as follows: in section I, some previous comparisons of British and American English are described; section II