Genre is a rhetorical element that heavily dictates how someone expresses their idea in writing. At the beginning of the semester , I understood genres as used in books and poetry to classify them, such as fiction and non-fiction. Then can be broken down even further into science fiction, fantasy, or historical. Though within Writing for Engineering, it has opened my eyes to the sophistry of genre, and how it is used within a professional standpoint.  The genre sets the structure of the writing, and which characteristics will be needed. The main genres which we deal with are technical descriptions, memos, lab reports, engineering proposals and this project itself, the portfolio.