 Why does Herder believe that identifying genre is essential for understanding? He has at least three reasons in mind (all of them good ones): First, grasping a work’s genre is itself an essential constituent of understanding the work and its contents (much as grasping a sentence’s meaning and illocutionary force is an essential constituent of understanding the sentence and its contents). Second, since an author intends his work to exemplify a certain genre, there will normally be aspects of the work’s meaning that are expressed, not explicitly in any of its parts, but rather through its intended exemplification of the genre. Third, correctly identifying the genre is also vitally important for accurately interpreting many things that are expressed explicitly in the parts of a work.