C1 Grammar Checklist: What Advanced Learners Should Be Able to Control

C1 grammar is not a museum of difficult constructions. The real standard is whether you can choose among ordinary and marked structures without losing accuracy or register.

Use this checklist as an audit. A structure belongs in your active grammar only if you can understand it, produce it, and edit it in context.

1. Time and counterfactual meaning

Can you move confidently between perfect forms, mixed conditionals, unreal past, and formal conditional inversion? Test yourself with mixed conditionals and conditional inversion.

2. Information packaging

Can you use passives, clefts, inversion, complex noun phrases, participle clauses, and information structure to shift focus without making the sentence heavier than necessary?

3. Clause compression and expansion

Can you decide when a full relative/adverbial clause is clearer and when a reduced form is better? Review reduced adverbial clauses.

4. Lexicogrammar

Do you control adjective/noun/verb + preposition frames, complementation patterns, and collocations? At C1, these lexical patterns often cause more real errors than tense formation.

Audit method: choose five structures per week, write two authentic sentences for each, then edit them 24 hours later without notes. Weakness revealed by production is more useful than another passive recognition quiz.