Genre, Genres, and the Teaching of Genre

From the placement of this article and from the headings above with the bibliographical citations of three books, readers of this piece know that this is a type of writing commonly called a review essay. From the editor's invitation, I knew that what I was to write was a review essay. What does that generic knowledge for writers and readers mean? The significance of this potentially shared understanding is much of what the developing new field of genre study-and these three books-is all about. To understand how writing works, theorists argue, we must understand how genre works, for writing is embedded within genre, writing is never genre-free.