"Genre" seems an elastic term, shared by various disciplines, and
capable of offering both micro and macro perspectives on discourse. In
fact, Pete Medway suggested at the recent Genre conference that there
was a conceptual advantage in what he called the term's "capaciousness."
In my own work, which has focussed on workplace writing and been much
influenced by Carolyn Miller and Charles Bazerman, among others, I have
thought of genre as a repeated rhetorical strategy that is designed
(often over a long time) to produce the knowledge a community of
practice needs to meet its objectives. In a sense, genres are the small
gears or wheels in the larger workings of institutional discourse. At
the heart of a genre is a text that community members would recognize as
a reiteration or repetition of a particular type of text (in the
workplace, such texts are often identified by acronym, abbreviation, or
nickname), but current conceptions of the term genre go beyond the
regular features of the text to recognize "similarity" in the
socially-construed exigence to which the text responds and in the social
action the text is meant to produce. One of the dangers of genre -- both
for those participating in them and for those studying them -- is that
appearances of similarity may well mask differences.
Anthony Pare pare who-is-at education.mcgill.ca