🧐 Rhetorical Situation

August 17, 2022

Concept: Speaker 🗣️

Definition
  • The source of a text; the person or group who has created or is creating the text.

Facts and/or Characteristics

  • A single speaker or many can produce a text.
  • Speakers sometimes show bias in their writing.
  • Understanding the speaker helps the reader understand the purpose.

Examples
  • Politicians giving a speech
  • The author of a magazine article

Non-examples
  • The audience (be sure to distinguish from the speaker)

Concept: Purpose ☄️

Definition
  • The reason the author created the text.
  • What the author would want from the reader reading the text.

Facts and/or Characteristics

  • The purpose is the reason why the author created the text; it should tell the reader why they want what they want.

Examples
  • Al Gore wrote a book to convince readers to better focus on cleaning our planet and causing less waste

Non-examples
  • The speaker (be sure to distinguish from the purpose)

Concept: Audience 👀

Definition
  • The person or people receiving a text

Facts and/or Characteristics
  • An audience has shared as well as individual beliefs, values, needs, and background.
  • The audience can be the speaker’s perception or the actual recipients of the text.

Examples
  • Students in a class, viewer of a TV show, member of a crowd during a speech, a potential voter watching a campaign ad.

Non-examples
  • Speaker (distinguish from audience)

Concept: Context 📄

Definition
  • Writers create texts within a particular context that includes the time, place, and occasion.

Facts and/or Characteristics
  • Emotionally charged situations can trigger heavy bias or emotional appeals
  • The context may be personal or cultural in scale

Examples
  • Shakespeare’s context was London, circa 1600.
  • MLK’s context for many speeches was the Civil Rights Movement
  • Office Max sells bulletproof backpacks in the context of an American society plagued by school shootings.

Non-examples
  • Occasion or Exigence (The inciting incident, so to speak.)
    • Exigence → an urgent need or demand.

Concept: Exigence ❗

Definition
  • The part of the rhetorical situation that inspires stimulates, provokes, or prompts writers to create a text.
  • The occasion, or inciting incident.

Facts and/or Characteristics
  • Exigence is often an “event” that happens in a particular context

Examples
  • Rosa Parks’ arrest was the exigence of the Montgomery Bus Boycott in the greater context of the Civil Rights movement.
  • Another mass shooting is usually the exigence for a more intense discussion of gun control and mental health (ex: Uvalde, TX).

Non-examples
  • Context (It’s more broad)