Instruction-tuned models aren't just trained differently; they embody a distinct genre of communication that blends human conversational patterns with formal markup structures, which developers should understand when building with these systems.
This paper argues that instruction-fine-tuned language models implement a specific genre—the instructional-conversational genre—shaped by human-AI conversation patterns, system prompts, and structured input formats. It examines how these technical choices create a recognizable communicative style.