Cinnabar and Alabaster

passages
defining genre loosely & then zooming in on miller's "social action" definition, she claims:
139. "as a child comes to appropriate and rework a genre (to 'own' it, in bakhtin's [1981] sense), she comes to learn not only the typical substance or formal features associated with the discourse but also--and surely more fundamentally--the situations that typically give rise to the genre, the social action she may accomplish with it, and the social and interpretive roles she may adopt with it. indeed, what a child learns is a new way of acting and making meaning"; when we learn new genres, "we discover new ways to mean and thus how to participate more fully in the actions of the community"
142. the young writer's "interpretation of 'book' at any moment in her development as a writer...defines those text points that are salient and then, in turn, appropriate text options. her notion of the genre--of the social and interpretive roles entailed in that genre--establishes a kind of overall meaning potential"--what she thinks "book" means "defines a series of choice points for samantha to identify and respond to. in a sense, then, the genre itself--or more precisely her interpretation of it--generates a kind of momentum that draws samantha forward as she composes, and that may encourage, perhaps even enable her to discover and invent new text-creating options"
146. clearly, in her early "books," "it appears that samantha's purpose primarily is to act like a student and to fulfill a class assignment--and to do so within her understanding of the Draw and Write genre"
150. when in one example the text she generates is too short, "not meeting the genre requirement of three lines--a requirement that draws the writer forward. driven by the syntactic-semantic momentum of the first part, samantha 'invents'" words to fill the lines; "neither her teacher nor her mother can explain the reference to violet day. when i asked samantha herself, she grinned sheepishly and merely shrugged. in a sense, it is the genre, not samantha, speaking."
154. in samantha's easter-bunny letter she follows "the formal structure of a letter. the tone is formal and polite, and all the extra periods and attempts at cursive suggest how samantha seeks to use all appropriate written language conventions. after all, she has an important audience, the easter bunny--who she truly believes is real--and an important statement to make"--rather than an artificial assignments, she's speaking to someone, and for a reason.
156. "for samantha, the effect of genre is clearly generative. her notion of how a particular genre works--the social role the writer adopts, the interpretive act she performs, the situations that give rise to the genre, the discourse features--defines for her a series of textual choice points which she negotiates as she creates text....she moves from texts that 'look like' certain genres to texts that 'say something' and then to texts that mean solely within the resources of written language. this growth is facilitated by her evolving notions of genre. to experiment with a genre is a way to create new situations, to learn new ways to make meaning and to interpret events and to be. in a sense, genre is like the hub of a wheel, related to and bringing together the several aspects of writing."