Crossers and Guarders

You are all a long way from the students described in "Tracing Discursive Resources."  You made the transition as high school writers to to first year writers long ago.  But the study does seem to roughly describe the problem you face in the re-gene of earlier work:  how do you apply what you know from work in the previous, more familiar genre to a new genre? To use the terms in the article, is your "prior knowledge" relevant?  This question is central to how well you can transfer your knowledge of one writing situation and apply it to another. This is the kind of thing "writing specialists" (the way we describe our rhetoric, composition, and communication graduates) should be able to do.

Here are some of the ideas I gleaned from reading the article that seem relevant to our work together:

• If you're over-confident about your abilities (expert status) you'll learn less about writing than people who approach a task with uncertainty and openness (novice status).  
• There are two kinds of writers: "boundary crossers" and "boundary guarders."  The "guarders" are more committed to just applying--relatively unchanged--what they know about previous genres to a new situation.  The "crossers" tend to cherry pick a range of relevant strategies from their previous writing experiences and apply them to a new genre.  They also recognize that what they are being asked to do is not like genres they know.
• We've talked a lot about genre this semester when we're really talking about what the article describes as "strategies" or "macrogenres."  Strategies are things like analyzing, shifting the tone,  or redefining the purpose. Macrogenres as forms like evaluation, compare and contrast, description, and summary. It's helpful to talk about shifts in all three--strategies, macrogenres, and genre.
• Then there's this:  "Part of what defines a genre is the way it pulls from, mixes, and reconfigures macrogenre text types or forms to enable its users to" do adapt their work to new situations.

 How might you apply these (and other concepts in the article) to your experience so far with re-genre?  Put differently, in some ways did this assignment make you a first-year writer again?