Our group’s chosen genre was a feasibility report. Some texts that a feasibility report might interact with include some research papers or other technical documents. Feasibility reports are a general analysis of how reasonable a task would be to undertake or complete. In order to add supporting evidence supporting one side of the argument, the writer of the report may reference previous research papers and include them as a reference at the end of the document. From the examples that we examined, we found that the reports were generally internally used within a company or organization, but there were also several examples which were made for public consumption. Interaction with reports were not always specific to one field, however. Despite the reports being very technical in their nature, the decisions that a company makes are usually made by some sort of management. So although the reports may be written by an engineer, it could be analyzed by someone in a business or management profession. An engineer would most likely be doing the research behind the report. They analyze all of the measures that determine feasibility and make their own suggestion at the end. When management reads the report, they can just look at all of the data that the engineers collected and make an informed decision based on that information.
Feasibility reports are created in response to some sort of idea that needs its viability to be determined and can potentially be a response to texts that present an idea. A feasibility report may be a response to a project proposal, for example. If a team member thinks that they have a good idea, they submit a project proposal that outlines the plan for their project. Management could then ask an engineer to write a feasibility report on this task to see whether it would be worth it to work on the task or not. Looking at the genre of feasibility reports as a genre system would be helpful. One could examine the feasibility reports in sequences of genres, looking from the problem statement to the reference material that supports feasibility arguments to the final conclusion. This would help us to better understand the genre and better examine how it interacts with other genres. A closer look at feasibility reports through the lens of a genre system would definitely prove useful to our group.
