Understanding the Rhetorical Situation

2

Central to success in writing across the spectrum of possibilities today is understanding your rhetorical situation, any situation in which you produce or receive a text. Ask yourself these questions whenever you encounter a new rhetorical situation:

  1. Who is the audience? How does the audience’s prior knowledge, values, and beliefs influence the production and reception of the text?

  2. What genre or type of text is it? How do genre conventions (what we call the text’s basic features) influence the production and reception of the text?

  3. When—at what time or for what occasion—is the text produced? Is it timely?

  4. Where—in what social or cultural context—will the communication take place? How does the situation influence the production and reception of the text?

  5. How—in what medium—is the text experienced? How does the medium influence the production and reception of the text?

  6. Why communicate? What is the purpose or goal driving the author’s choices and affecting the audience’s perceptions of the text?

Composing with an awareness of the rhetorical situation means writing not only to express yourself but also to engage your readers and respond to their concerns. You write to influence how your readers think and feel about a subject and, depending on the genre, perhaps also to inspire them to act.

Genres are simply ways of categorizing texts — for example, we can distinguish between fiction and nonfiction; subdivide fiction into romance, mystery, and science fiction genres; or break down mystery even further into hard-boiled detective, police procedural, true crime, and classic whodunit genres. Composing with genre awareness affects your choices — what you write about (topic), the claims you make (thesis), how you support those claims (reasons and evidence), and how you organize it all.

Each genre has a set of conventions, or basic features, readers expect texts in that genre to use. Although individual texts within the same genre vary a great deal — for example, no two proposals, even those arguing for the same solution, will be identical — they nonetheless include the same basic features. For example, everyone expects a proposal to identify the problem (usually establishing that it is serious enough to require solving) and to offer a solution (usually arguing that it is preferable to alternative solutions because it is less expensive or easier to implement).

Still, these conventions are not recipes but broad frameworks within which writers are free to be creative. Most writers, in fact, find that frameworks make creativity possible. Depending on the formality of the rhetorical situation and the audience’s openness to innovation, writers may also remix features of different genres or media, as you will see in the Remix sections in Chapters 2-10.

Like genre, the medium in which you are working also affects many of your design and content choices. For example, written texts can use color, type fonts, charts, diagrams, and still images to heighten the visual impact of the text, delivering information vividly and persuasively. If you are composing Web pages or apps, you have many more options to make your text truly multimedia — for example, by adding hyperlinks, animation, audio, video, and interactivity to your written text.