Many genre scholars have focused on how individuals might build genre knowledge, generally understood as the enculturation processes, gradual stages, or ingredients that lead to one’s facility with a genre in context. While genre knowledge describes whether people can engage genres, it does not describe the various factors that shape how people may engage genres. By consolidating scholarship across Rhetorical Genre Studies (RGS), this article characterizes genre access as the power, opportunity, permission, and/or right to engage genre. Furthermore, this article integrates Network Gatekeeping Theory to develop a micro-level analytical approach for explicitly describing genre access. The author demonstrates and develops genre access as a concept and analytical approach with an illustrative example from a larger ethnographic project. Specifically, this illustrative example explores genre access for the Staff Report, a common genre in local government that proposes recommendations from individual departments to their elected City Commissioners for voted approval. Overall, the purpose of this article is (1) to consolidate and extend RGS’s exploration of the power, opportunity, permission, and/or right to engage genres; (2) to identify and name genre access as a fundamental aspect of how genres work; and (3) to provide a micro-level analytical language for researchers to tease out the various factors the shape genre access.

Genre has long been used by Writing Studies ethnographers as a theoretical orientation and analytical tool to bridge text and context. This article describes how genre-based ethnographies as methodology might get taken up at the level of method. Drawing on a genre-based ethnographic study as an example and guide, this article presents a process of data collection that builds ethnographic sites from genre by emergently identifying chains of data sources and collection techniques emanating from starting genres. Applying a genre orientation at the level of method centers inquiry on writing and mitigates the need to define site boundaries. By articulating how a genre orientation might shape ethnography at the level of method, this article encourages a stronger articulation between research methodologies and methods across the field of Writing Studies. Further, this article can be used as a guide for researchers conducting genre-based ethnographies.

This article proposes that writing instructors can present genre innovation as a strategy for asserting class (and other) identities within academic discourses. Drawing on sample student innovations of integrating emotions, expanding modes, and reconstructing audiences, this pedagogical approach seeks to value varied class identities and increase multivocality in academe.