In scholarship on teaching for transfer from writing studies, a strong emphasis has been placed on knowledge about genre. Arguably, it can be seen as a threshold concept that helps students (or any of us) gain access to knowledge about writing. In this episode, I offer some reasons why genre should be a dominant concept in most writing classes. I also introduce an acronym (ROCSS) that I developed and use in my classes to help students remember how genres work. In future episodes, I'll discuss how and why I settled on that acronym and provide examples of how I use it with students.