Text-type and discourse awareness: genre, purpose, tone and cohesion
This domain covers the questions that ask what kind of text you are reading, what it is doing, how the writer feels about the subject, and how its sentences hold together. It also underpins your own writing: the same features that let you recognise an opinion column let you produce one.
Recognising genre
- News report: headline, dateline, third person, past tenses, attributions to sources.
- Opinion column: first person, evaluative adjectives, rhetorical questions, direct address to the reader.
- Popular science: definitions, comparisons, passive voice, hedges such as scientists believe.
- Advertisement: imperatives, superlatives, very short clauses, wordplay.
- Review: description mixed with evaluation and a recommendation.
- Interview: question-and-answer structure, spoken features, fillers.
Naming purpose precisely
Choose from: inform, describe, persuade, argue, warn, criticise, compare, entertain, recommend, explain, complain, request. Inform and persuade are not interchangeable: an article that reports both sides is informing; one that only quotes sources supporting its own conclusion is persuading.
Detecting tone
Tone lives in small signals: evaluative adjectives (appalling, modest), intensifiers, modality (must, should), irony markers such as so-called or scare quotes, yet another, understatement, and rhetorical questions. Label the tone from a fixed set - neutral, critical, ironic, enthusiastic, cautious, concerned, nostalgic, sarcastic.
Cohesion
- Lexical chains: the key noun reappears as a synonym or a related word, not as repetition.
- Substitution and ellipsis: the one, do so, or a gap where the verb is understood.
- Referencing: pronouns pointing back to a whole clause.
- Conjunction: markers of addition, contrast, concession, cause, result, exemplification - each with a distinct function.
Worked example
The council has introduced yet another consultation on the so-called regeneration of the waterfront. Residents, we are told, will be consulted. One wonders who wrote the questions.
Genre: opinion column (first-person aside, direct address). Purpose: to criticise, not to inform. Tone: ironic and sceptical. Evidence: yet another signals weariness and implies repetition; so-called withholds endorsement of the label regeneration; we are told distances the writer from the claim; the rhetorical question One wonders who wrote the questions implies the consultation is rigged. Any answer of neutral or informative misses all four signals.
Traps that cost marks
- Matching a keyword in the question to a keyword in the text instead of comparing functions.
- Treating an opposing view that the writer quotes in order to refute as the writer's own.
- Assuming long, latinate words guarantee a formal register.
- Missing concession structures (admittedly … but) that reverse the expected tone.
- Labelling an ironic text as enthusiastic because the surface words are positive.