Genres in Scientific and Technical Rhetoric

The idea of genre marks large-scale repeated patterns in human symbolic production and interaction, patterns that are taken to be meaningful. Genre thus can be defined by reference to pattern, or form, and by reference to theories of meaning and interaction. This report on a discussion of scientific and technical genres at the 2012 Vicentennial meeting of the Association for the Rhetoric of Science & Technology (ARST) briefly considers the differences and difficulties with different ways of defining genres and their relevance to science and technology, explorations of the ways genres change or evolve, and pedagogical applications of genre analysis in scientific and technical discourse