“As human beings, our presencing takes place within rhetorical and social boundaries or environments we call ‘genres.’ As we move from one sociorhetorical environment to the next, we shift genre boundaries, which maintain and reproduce certain ways of perceiving a particular social activity, ways of relating to others, and ways of lexicogrammatically and rhetorically interacting with one another within the environment. The ways in which we use language to perform certain social activities and to enact certain social relations and identities changes as we adjust from one genre-constituted environment to the next. The environment and its participants’ activities and identities are, therefore, always in the process of reproducing each other within genre” (75). Within this, we have motive and intention. “Motive exists on the conceptual level of [genre]; it frames the possible ways of acting and meaning in any given time and space…[W]e must transform motive into agency, and this is where intention plays a role. Intention is where motive-potentials become internalized by actors and then actualized as agency” (76-7)
“Genres, therefore, recursively operate on two levels at once: the ideological and the textual. At the ideological level, genres maintain the ways in which we perceive particular environments as requiring certain immediate and ‘appropriate’ attention and response – in short, exigencies or motives for potential action. At the textual level, genres maintain the rhetorical and lexicogrammatical conventions that allow their users to participate in these environments in meaningful and recognizable ways” (77-8).