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. They thus can be defined by reference to pattern, or form, and by reference to theories of meaning and interaction. As a consequence, there are many ways to define genres, with some looking internally, to linguistic features and clusters of features, and others externally, to discourse communities and social interactions or recurrent rhetorical situations. Our discussion covered differences and difficulties with alternate ways of defining genres, 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.1 What follows is an outline of the issues and questions that our discussion raised. We had insufficient time to consider technology separately from science, even as we recognized that it would be different. I. Definitions of Genr