Among Swales' (1996) list of occluded academic genres, retention-promotion-tenure (RPT) evaluations have been little studied. These evaluative reports, however, can inform EAP researchers, teachers, and students about ways that writers both follow and transgress discourse conventions to fulfill various purposes through an institutional text. Drawing on a corpus of 34 RPT reports from one university context, this study examines report writers' use of "inventive" strategies, i.e., those that playfully deviate from RPT report conventions, and factors that may encourage inventiveness. Analysis of the reports reveals that writers' playful strategies include hyperbole, irony/humor, and informal language features. These elements may fulfill not only the reports' conventional function of evaluating faculty but also unofficial purposes such as entertaining and showing solidarity with readers. Inventiveness is used more frequently by some report writers than others, possibly due to their individual writing styles and/or greater familiarity with the evaluated faculty member. Writers also receive license to be playful through the "uptake" (Freadman, 2002) between different levels of reports in the university's RPT genre chain. The paper considers applications of these findings for EAP graduate writing classes.