I personally never had trouble communicating the genre of a writing piece. The genre is the different kinds of writing. These types of writings can include a novel, poetry, newspaper, magazines, articles, etc. However, the genre really depends on the whole of the content that you end up doing.

For example, for my lab report on the experimentation of the compression/tensile strength of wood and steel, I used specific kinds of content to fit the genre of a lab report. As shown in figure 1, the table of contents represents all the content needed to create a sufficient lab report such as the abstract, introduction,  method, results, etc.