On pg. 211, Schryer notes that Miller as well as Bakhtin "...saw genre as a fusion of content and style." This quote caught me since I myself am trying to decode the "fusion of content and style" that is technical writing. Having graduated as a history major I wrote in order to prove a larger point. In technical writing I'm doing something similar by not necessarily proving my finely worded argument, but still searching the most concise and clear way to frame information for others to digest.
During my undergrad, my audience was my professor. Not a soul on any of the construction sites I worked on after college cared about why I believed the end of the Cold War was one of the major facilitators of political change in South Africa in the early 1990's. But I have always looked for ways of explaining complex historical events in ways that my peers would not only listen to, but be genuinely interested in. This is one aspect of technical writing that has drawn my own attention.
To me, taking complex subjects/information and distilling them into something easy and understandable is like putting a puzzle together. So reading about how Miller, Bakhtin and Schryer look at content and style in regards to Genre and record keeping to me illustrates what it is technical writers are doing. While Pullman, Gu and Albers tell us we are transforming into content manager hybrids, the basic elements of content and style within the genre are still the building blocks on top of which we can add more elements such as new software.
Genre like electricity, like water is always moving. It can inhabit many forms and shapes, but it never stops evolving. Genre is a building block of style and content providing a path, but the path is never walled in. There is still room to navigate ones own path within it without ever losing sight of the destination. In technical communication we have to be exposed to as many modes and genres to further our own cause of communicating information that not only explains something complex, but can create genuine interest in something that was previously deemed too difficult. To me, that's awesome.