Genre is essentially just the kind of writing that one is engaging in, the form that a particular document or collection of information takes.  This can be many different things, but it is likely (ideally) to reflect whatever specific content there is to be stored and to present it in the most effective and efficient way possible.  Audience can have an impact just as content can, though, and this is yet another way in which audience has an overarching effect on every aspect of the creation of a technical document.  Genre is likely to play a big role in the stance that is taken: I largely took a much more neutral stance with a less overt tone than I did for either the memo or the proposal.  Our understanding of genre has been developing for the entire semester, both in the sense that we have become familiar with more types of writing and have developed a greater overall knowledge of technical writing by noticing similarities and differences across these genres and in the sense that we have come to have a greater general understanding of how genre impacts all other aspects of the rhetorical situation.  I have probably understood genre as a concept the best since the beginning (figure 12), but it has taken the whole course for me to understand the nuances of that latter sense, and it seems that an understanding of this particular rhetorical element is one that you keep building as you add more genres to your repertoire and as you do more technical writing (figure 13)

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