At C2, being correct is not enough; you must sound like the right kind of text. This unit hands you the grammatical machinery that tells a report from a review, a news story from an academic paper — and teaches you to hold one genre without slipping out of it.
A genre (or text-type) is not just a topic; it is a bundle of conventions — grammatical, lexical and structural — that a community of readers expects for a given purpose. A report, a review, a news story, an academic article and a formal letter each carry their own markers: their own tense, person, degree of hedging and typical openings. You already command the raw grammar; what is new at C2 is choosing it consciously so that a text reads unmistakably as its type.
Every convention answers to purpose, audience and context. This overlaps with register (Unit 1), but is not the same: register is how formal you are, whereas genre is the whole set of expectations attached to a text-type. The C2 skill is threefold: to recognise genre markers, to sustain one genre without slipping, and to know when a deliberate hybrid serves the writer and when a mixed text merely confuses.
Every genre leaves fingerprints in its grammar. Three of the clearest are tense (which time-frame the genre favours), person (whether the writer appears as "I", "we" or vanishes into an impersonal voice) and stance (how boldly or cautiously a claim is made). Read these three, and you can usually name the text-type before you reach the content.
| Marker | What it signals | Example |
|---|---|---|
| tense | past for news; present for reviews and findings | The film opens in silence. (review) |
| person | impersonal for academic/report; "I" allowed in reviews | It was found that… (report) |
| stance | hedged in academia; assertive in journalism | The data suggest a link. (academic) |
These two genres prize objectivity. The academic article defines its terms, hedges its claims and hides the author behind an impersonal, often nominalised voice. The report shares that restraint but adds a fixed architecture — headings, findings, and a recommendations section — and leans on the passive to foreground the data rather than the writer.
| Marker | Academic article | Report |
|---|---|---|
| voice | impersonal, nominalised: an analysis of… | passive: it was observed that… |
| stance | hedged: the results may suggest… | measured: the figures indicate… |
| shape | claim → evidence → cautious conclusion | headings → findings → recommendations |
Two public genres, two opposite jobs. The news report tells you what happened: freshest fact first (the "inverted pyramid"), past tense, third person, and every claim attributed to a source. The review tells you what it was like: the narrative present, frank evaluative adjectives, and a licensed first person that weighs strengths against flaws.
| Marker | News report | Review |
|---|---|---|
| tense | past: the council voted… | present: the novel follows… |
| attribution | according to officials; residents said | the writer's own judgement is expected |
| language | neutral, factual, concise | evaluative: gripping, uneven, luminous |
The formal letter is the most formulaic genre of all: fixed openings and closings, no contractions, indirect requests, and a clear statement of purpose. Its conventions are so settled that any lapse is instantly felt. This makes it the perfect place to see genre consistency — the discipline of keeping one text-type's markers steady from first line to last.
| Element | Convention | Example |
|---|---|---|
| opening | named → Dear Mr Kaya; unnamed → Dear Sir or Madam | Dear Sir or Madam, |
| request | indirect and softened, never blunt | I would be grateful if you could… |
| closing | named → Yours sincerely; unnamed → Yours faithfully | Yours faithfully, |
Genres set up expectations, and a writer can either meet them or bend them on purpose. A deliberate hybrid — feature journalism marrying a storyteller's colour to a reporter's sourcing — is a controlled effect. An accidental slip — a report that suddenly exclaims, a formal letter that ends "cheers" — simply breaks the contract and unsettles the reader. The difference is control.
| Move | Deliberate hybrid | Accidental slip |
|---|---|---|
| effect | fresh, purposeful, still coherent | jarring; the reader's trust drops |
| example | a review that opens like a short story | an academic paper that turns chatty |
| reader feels | "this writer is in command" | "this writer lost the thread" |
These are the genre faults that surface even in fluent C2 writing. Each is a failure of consistency — a marker borrowed from the wrong text-type. Audit your drafts against every row.
| Wrong ✗ | Right ✓ | Why? |
|---|---|---|
| The results were, like, totally surprising to us. (report) | The results were unexpected. | informal, personal voice imported into an impersonal genre. |
| Dear Sir or Madam, … Anyway, cheers! | Dear Sir or Madam, … Yours faithfully, | a chatty sign-off breaks the letter's fixed courtesies. |
| This X causes Y and will always do so. (academic) | This appears to contribute to Y. | missing hedging — academic stance must stay cautious. |
| The council made the shameful, idiotic decision. (news) | Critics called the decision "shameful," the report said. | unattributed judgement turns a news report into an opinion piece. |
| The film is good. It follows a man. It was released. (review) | The film is a quietly devastating portrait of a man. | flat, factual news style where a review needs evaluation. |
A junior writer drafts a passage; an editor names the genre it has drifted into and pulls it back. Read it twice and watch how each note fixes a marker — and where the editor says a deliberate blend is fine.
Choose the correct answer. — 10 questions, each one is marked instantly. Questions get harder as you go.
Learn the vocabulary of text-types, then use it to compare how different genres would handle the very same story.
Take one small event (a local shop closing, a match result, a new film) and describe, out loud, how three different genres would tell it. Write 8 sentences and use at least 8 of the words above. Make each genre's markers visible and deliberate.
Sentence starters (you can begin with these):
Değerlendirme öğretmenin tarafından yapılacak. (Your teacher will review your task.)
Read the feature, then work through the five tasks.
Skilled readers prepare before they start. Before you read, think about these three questions (you do not need to write the answers):
Words to spot (from the Speaking section): genre · convention · marker · hedging · attribution · hybrid
Every piece of writing signs a silent contract with its reader. Before a single argument is weighed, the shape of the text — its genre, or text-type — has already made promises. A news report vows to put the freshest fact first and to attribute every claim; an academic article promises caution, defined terms and an impersonal voice; a formal letter offers its fixed courtesies, "Dear Sir or Madam" answered in the end by "Yours faithfully". These conventions are not decoration. They are the grammar of expectation.
What makes the metaphor of a contract so exact, in a way that softer words like "style" or "tone" never quite are, is that a contract binds two parties rather than one. The reader has obligations too: to read a leading article as opinion rather than reportage, to forgive a poem its ellipses, to expect of an instruction manual neither suspense nor irony. This mutual understanding is learned so early and held so unconsciously that we notice it only when it is breached. We do not, as a rule, admire the plainness of a railway timetable, because plainness is precisely what the timetable undertook to deliver; yet we would be scandalised to stumble on a joke buried among its columns. The contract works, in short, by becoming invisible, and its very invisibility is the truest measure of how thoroughly a genre has done its work.
Consider how differently each genre handles the same event. Where a news report states, "Ministers criticised the plan yesterday, sources say," an academic paper hedges: "The proposal appears to have attracted ministerial criticism." A review, meanwhile, cares less for the fact than for the flavour, judging in the vivid present: "the plan is a bold, flawed, oddly moving gamble." Same event; three grammars; three readerships. Tense, person, and the presence or absence of hedging are not free choices — they are the fingerprints of type.
Take the news report first. Its opening is not an accident of habit but a piece of architecture: the so-called inverted pyramid loads the heaviest facts at the summit, so that a reader who abandons the piece after two lines still departs with its essentials intact. Attribution, likewise, is doctrine rather than mere decoration; the reporter who writes "sources say" or "according to the ministry" is not hedging so much as declining to vouch personally for the claim, handing the reader both the information and its provenance in a single breath. Overt opinion is exiled to the leader column, the byline stays cool and largely invisible, and the past tense dominates — because news, almost by definition, records what has already come to pass.
The academic article obeys an almost opposite logic. Where the reporter races towards the fact, the scholar circles it warily, defining terms, conceding rival readings, and burying the self beneath the passive voice and the cautious modal. "It could be argued", "the data appear to suggest", "this may indicate" — such hedges are not timidity but a species of honesty, the visible seams of a discipline that prizes doubt above assertion. The impersonal voice performs a kindred service: by writing "the sample was analysed" rather than "I analysed the sample", the author quietly claims that the finding would stand whoever had performed the work. Objectivity, real or merely professed, is thus stitched into the grammar itself, and a paper that abandoned it would forfeit its standing long before its argument was tested.
The review, last of the three, throws off this reticence altogether. It exists to judge, and so it reaches for the present tense, which lends its verdicts the ring of standing truth, and for the first person, which stakes a claim no hedge could soften. Its adjectives crowd together on purpose; a single measured epithet would betray the enthusiasm — or the disdain — that is a review's whole reason for being. Where the academic writer vanishes and the reporter defers, the reviewer struts, and the reader, far from resenting the intrusion, has come precisely to be told what one confident and particular mind makes of the thing. To strip a review of its swagger would not make it more truthful; it would merely make it useless.
Genres can, of course, be blended. Feature journalism deliberately marries the storyteller's colour to the reporter's sourcing, and the hybrid is no accident but a considered effect. Yet blending is not the same as slipping. A report that suddenly exclaims, or a formal letter that signs off "anyway, cheers", has not innovated; it has simply broken its promise, and the jarred reader trusts it less.
The digital age has multiplied these contracts rather than dissolved them. Each new platform breeds its own conventions with startling speed: the thread that withholds its point to keep the reader scrolling, the product listing whose bullet points promise scannability above all, the star rating that compresses an entire verdict into a single glyph. Newcomers to any such form are spotted at once, not because their content is poor but because their markers are subtly wrong — too long, too formal, too earnest, too slow. Even the sign-off has hardened into genre: an email that ends without one may read, to some, as curt, while to others the same blankness signals seriousness. The conventions migrate and mutate, but they never truly disappear.
Why should a broken convention cost so much, one might ask, when no fact has been falsified? Because the reader's trust rests less on the accuracy of any single claim than on the steadiness of the whole. A voice that keeps its promises is a voice one can predict, and a predictable voice is one that can be believed even where it cannot be checked. The reader who catches a formal report giggling, or an academic paper thumping the table, does not merely wince at the lapse of taste; they begin, quietly, to wonder what else the writer has failed to govern. Competence in one register is read, rightly or not, as a proxy for competence in all the others.
None of these conventions, it is worth stressing, is arbitrary at its root; each grew from a purpose. The report front-loads because its reader is pressed for time; the scholar hedges because a community punishes overclaiming; the reviewer heaps on emphasis because indifference would be worthless to a reader deciding how to spend an evening. To learn a genre well is therefore to reverse-engineer it — to ask of each convention not merely "what is the rule?" but "what problem was this rule invented to solve?" The writer who grasps the purpose behind a marker can bend or even break it deliberately and to good effect, whereas the writer who has memorised only the surface can do nothing but obey it or blunder against it.
Nor are these contracts written once and for all. What counts as a properly formal letter in one language or generation can seem starchy, or brusque, in another; the business email has loosened perceptibly within a single working lifetime, and the academic "we" is slowly ceding ground to a more candid "I". A convention is a living settlement between writers and readers, quietly renegotiated with every shift in what a community has come to expect. This is why imitation alone will always lag a little behind: the templates set down in a handbook describe the contract as it stood when the book went to press, not as it is being redrawn, right now, in the reading.
The skilled writer, then, reads the contract before drafting a line. Admittedly, conventions shift across cultures and decades; nonetheless, at any given moment a genre carries expectations a writer ignores at their peril. To master a text-type is not to memorise a template but to know, precisely, which promise each choice is quietly making.
Choose the correct answer.
Are these sentences true or false, according to the text?
Complete each quotation with the ONE word the text uses. Mind the genre marker (the impersonal voice, the fixed letter closing, the concession signal).
Write your answer in your own words. These questions are not marked automatically.
1. The writer calls a genre "an unwritten contract" that makes "promises". In your own words, what does that metaphor capture — and why does it matter for a writer?
2. The text puts the same event into three grammars (news, academic, review). What is being demonstrated as well as stated?
3. The text distinguishes a deliberate "hybrid" from an accidental "slip". Do you agree the difference matters? Give a reason from your own reading.
Find one clear example of each marker in the text — each appears at least once: attribution, hedging, an evaluative phrase, a formal-letter courtesy, a genre hybrid, a concession-refutation. (You will reuse this awareness in the Writing section.) Note them down, then check.
Convert a text from the wrong genre into the right one — then drill your instincts with 10 quick questions.
Below is a paragraph that has slipped out of its genre: it is meant to be a formal report for a manager, but it reads like a chatty text message. Your job is to rewrite it into a proper report, correcting every marker — without losing a single fact.
Sentence starters (you can begin with these):
Değerlendirme öğretmenin tarafından yapılacak. (Your teacher will review your task.)
10 quick questions on genre and text-type conventions. Each one is marked instantly. Questions get harder as you go.
Write a short, rousing speech that argues one clear case — weaving the devices into a real argument. Your teacher will review it.
At C1 you learned to link and organise ideas; at C2 you learn to persuade with them. Each device below is a pattern of structure. The art is not using them all, but weaving two or three into a real argument, in a register the moment can bear.
| Device | What it does | Example to model |
|---|---|---|
| tricolon | groups three parallel parts, often rising | Your voice, your vote, your future. |
| antithesis | balances two opposites for contrast | Not for the few, but for the many. |
| anaphora | repeats an opening to build momentum | We can act, we can lead, we can win. |
| rhetorical question | asks what needs no answer, to pull the reader in | How long must we wait for change? |
| concession-refutation | admits a point, then overturns it | Admittedly it is hard; yet it is right. |
| inclusive "we" | folds the reader into a shared cause | Together, we decide what happens next. |
A persuasive speech has a shape: a hook that grips, a body that argues and concedes, and a close that rouses. The devices belong at the joints — the opening question, the tricolon in the body, the anaphora at the end.
| Part | What to write | Device to reach for |
|---|---|---|
| A. Hook | grab attention; name the stakes | rhetorical question, inclusive "we" |
| B. Body | argue the case; answer the other side | tricolon, antithesis, concession-refutation |
| C. Close | a rousing call to action | anaphora rising to a climax, then stop |
Choose one motion you believe in — save a local library, ban single-use plastic, make a landmark car-free, protect a night bus route. Write a short persuasive speech of about 200–240 words that a real audience could hear. Prove you can weave the devices into an argument — and know when to stop.
Değerlendirme öğretmenin tarafından yapılacak. (Your teacher will evaluate your writing.)
Mixed questions from the whole unit, then check what you can do.
14 questions: grammar + vocabulary + reading + practice. Each question is marked instantly.
Tick what you can do now. Honest answers help your teacher.
İşaretlemediğin madde varsa ilgili bölüme dönüp tekrar çalış — soldaki menüden her bölüme geri dönebilirsin.
Oturum kontrol ediliyor...