THE RHETORICAL SITUATION

Purpose

Audience

Rhetorical appeals

Modes & media

Purpose

Thibault’s purpose is to outline specific tasks for her assistant, Mallory Moore, to complete. The specific tasks are (1) to find contact information for a list of authors provided and (2) to find additional authors.

Audience

The primary audience is Moore, Thibault’s assistant, who must perform the tasks outlined. The secondary audience is Sophia Snyder, who might be called upon to provide advice. Other audiences might include others at the company; also, all work e-mails and memos are stored in an organization’s archive.

Rhetorical appeals

Thibault appeals to Moore’s sense of logos by organizing the tasks described in the memo in an orderly fashion.

Thibault develops her ethos by indicating that she is well informed about the project she’s working on and has a clear and systematic approach to the project in mind.

Modes & media

Mode = written The memo is text based and does not include images, though some memos benefit from images. Because the document is a written text (and not, say, a voice mail), the recipient, Moore, will be able to reread the memo (even print it out as a to-do list) as she completes the tasks to make sure she has done everything asked of her, or to check the names of the universities listed.

Medium = digital Thibault and Moore’s company, Bedford/St. Martin’s, like most companies in the twenty-first century, encourages employees to use e-mail to send memos. E-mails allow colleagues to communicate quickly—and also allow for easy tracking of the memo. If Thibault wants to double-check when she sent the memo, she can simply check her “sent” or “Moore” folder and look at the time stamp on the e-mail. She could even enable her e-mail to request a “read receipt,” which is an automatically generated e-mail from the recipient to the sender confirming that the e-mail has been received and opened.