I would say that other than exigence, purpose is the element that I have had the hardest time wrapping my head around.  With technical documents, especially as they become more dynamic and more complex (such as transitioning from a two-page memo to a 20-page proposal), there are a lot of things that one is trying to accomplish.  Even just with my memo, I wanted to make administrators aware of a problem with their system, provide them with solutions to this problem, encourage them to reach out to me to discuss the issue further, and get them to actually fix the problem either by doing so themselves or passing the memo on to relevant parties.  It can be easy to just list every single thing that you want to do with your document, but then you could go down a path where you are granularizing as much as addressing it section by section.  We worked to try and be precise with our understanding and description of purpose, and I believe that I was able to keep up with this, but I also might have lost the bigger picture in doing so.  For example, in early genre analyses, I picked up on the intimate relationship between audience and purpose in that I whittled my descriptions of purpose down to what documents specifically wanted as a direct result (figure 3).  I didn’t frame it as just a wish list or as the grand goal of the writer.  However, this likely also meant that I wasn’t picking up on all of the facets of purpose, or perhaps how it determines other things like content or stance.  I developed a more well-rounded sense of purpose as I went along, able to recognize not only the different purposes across mine and many other’s projects but also the different modes of purpose found in different genres (figure 4).

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