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 student council voted… | present: the novel follows… |
| attribution | according to teachers; students 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 school made the shameful, idiotic decision. (news) | Critics called the decision "shameful," the school paper 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.
Nowhere is this contract signed more often, or more unconsciously, than in the life of a student. In the space of a single week the same teenager may file a match report for the school newspaper, draft a write-up for a science project, compose a book review for the year-group magazine, and email the head teacher to request a room for the debating society. Each task looks, at first glance, like plain writing; in truth each belongs to a distinct genre, and each summons a wholly different grammar. The reader who opens the sports column expects a headline fact and a quoted coach; the teacher who opens the request expects courtesy, not slang. To confuse the two is no small stylistic wobble but a breach of promise, and readers register the breach long before they can name what has gone wrong.
Consider how differently each genre handles the same event. Where a news report states, "The school banned phones at lunch yesterday, students say," an academic paper hedges: "The new rule appears to have attracted considerable student opposition." A review, meanwhile, cares less for the fact than for the flavour, judging in the vivid present: "the ban is a bold, clumsy, strangely well-meant 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.
The academic article and the report, the two genres that dominate coursework, make the heaviest demands of this discipline. When a student writes up a geography fieldwork exercise or a history source analysis, the convention is unforgiving: the first person retreats behind an impersonal voice, verbs stiffen into nouns, and every bold claim is cushioned by a hedge. "My results prove that the river speeds up downstream" is the sentence of a novice; "The measurements appear to indicate an increase in velocity downstream" is the sentence of someone who has read the contract. This caution is not timidity. It signals that the writer knows the limits of a single dataset and respects the reader's right to weigh the evidence. The report adds an architecture of its own — a heading, a findings section, a sober line of recommendations — and any stray exclamation mark rings as loudly false inside it as a shout in a silent library.
The review and the news report, by contrast, are the genres a student meets most often beyond the classroom, and they pull in opposite directions. Writing for the school magazine, a reviewer is licensed — indeed expected — to say "I" and to pass judgement: a novel is "quietly devastating", a film "gripping but overlong", a concert "a triumph undone by its own ambition". Yet a verdict is not a shrug, and "I liked it" earns nothing until the reasons follow. The news reporter must almost disappear. Covering that same concert for the front page, the reporter keeps every opinion firmly inside quotation marks — "audience members described the finale as chaotic" — and lets attribution shoulder each claim. A young writer who forgets this, and brands a decision "shameful" in a straight news piece without sourcing the judgement, has quietly switched genres in mid-sentence and turned a report into an editorial.
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.
Here the gulf between a deliberate hybrid and an accidental slip becomes a matter of craft rather than luck. A gifted feature writer for the school paper might open a piece on exam stress with a small scene — a corridor at seven in the morning, a single light burning in the library — before turning, paragraph by paragraph, to statistics and quoted interviews. That opening borrows the storyteller's colour on purpose, and because the writer knows precisely which convention is being bent, the hybrid feels assured rather than accidental. The slip is its mirror image: the same evocative sentence dropped, unplanned, into a formal complaint to the examination board, where it reads not as artistry but as a lapse of nerve. The measure, in every case, is control — whether the writer chose to cross the border or merely stumbled over it.
What lends these expectations their quiet force is that readers absorb them without ever being taught them outright. No one hands a teenager a rulebook decreeing that a review may open with a joke while a lab report may not; and yet, after a few years of reading, the mismatch is felt at once, the way a wrong note is heard in a familiar tune. Expectations also shift with the platform. A breezy, first-person aside that charms in a blog post about a school trip becomes a liability in that same student's university application, where the readership — an admissions tutor facing a hundred essays — expects poise above personality. Genre, in this sense, is never fixed in the abstract; it is a standing negotiation between a purpose, a platform, and the particular readers a writer hopes to reach.
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 the student council, 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 the school library, ban single-use plastic in the canteen, keep the late school bus running, make the town centre car-free. 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...