Rhetoric & the Rhetorical Situation

smendez; TWU FYC Team

10 Rhetoric & the Rhetorical Situation

In this chapter, we will practice:

understanding what rhetoric and rhetorical analysis are
researching and identifying texts’ rhetorical situations

What is rhetoric?

In the world, rhetoric refers to the power of language, signs, and symbols to move/affect bodies. It refers to the ways people argue. It refers to the ways we are persuaded. We tend to use the word “rhetoric” in a negative way to refer to messages intended to manipulate or “trick” us. But actually all communication is rhetorical. All communication is composed to forward a message and evoke a response. Rhetoric is a thing we are doing all the time. In school, “rhetoric” refers to the study of the power of language, signs, and symbols to move/affect bodies. It refers to understanding how language, signs, and symbols are (consciously and unconsciously) used by speakers to communicate certain particular meanings and how audiences (consciously and unconsciously) respond. Rhetoric is how communication happens, how communication works. Rhetoric asks: What does this text DO? What does language DO?

Because writing and communication is embedded in community and context, we must also be rhetorical, as in responsive to specific audiences’ needs and expectations, considering of specific contexts, and composed towards specific purpose in relation to context and audience. In this unit, we will learn to think critically and think strategically about our own and others’ rhetoric. We will also learn how to write analytically about rhetoric.

Before we begin, however, we must remember one key factor of this unit and this course: you are already doing rhetoric all the time. You are already a savvy speaker. You are already a savvy audience member. Every time you determine whether an email is spam or an image AI-generated, you are doing rhetoric. Every time you write a resumé or a college-entrance essay or go to a job interview, you are doing rhetoric. Every time you argue with your siblings or convince your friends to see a movie, you are doing rhetoric. Our goal in this class and in this unit is to help you sharpen your skills, to deploy them consciously towards your own ends, to give you language to understand distinctions between communication and manipulation, and to realize the power you, daily, wield.

Discussion: Rhetoric & Culture

The study of rhetoric is often credited to Western philosophers like Gorgias, Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle and many of the terms we use use in rhetoric today come from these ancient speakers. But rhetoric does not belong to one particular culture, but instead has a rich history featuring different styles and approaches to the art of persuasion across the globe. Rather than thinking that one persuasive method is “right” and another is “wrong,” we need to recognize that persuasion depends on context, which involves cultural, historical, technological, and situational factors that determine successful arguments. Furthermore, the persuasive tools available to us today are very different from those used even in recent history. Think of the ways that social media has expanded our understanding of and connection other people living around the globe. The possible means of persuasion have expanded throughout history, which means that writers need to determine which tools can possibly help them in an argument.

We can point to many examples of rhetoric around the world that may help us see beyond the classical Greco-Roman concepts. In Ancient Egypt, for example, silence was a powerful rhetorical tool. Silence was not only an indicator of good character (or ethos, as the Greeks would say), but also aligned the person who declined to speak too much with the order inherent in the universe itself. To be wisely quiet instead of foolishly gabby was to invite the presence of the goddess Ma’at, whose truth and order would work on one’s behalf (David Hutto’s work develops this in some detail).

Consider, also, a major moment in the organization of rhetoric in China: Chen Kui’s work Wen Ze (or The Rules of Writing) from 1170 CE. Kirkpatrick and Xu tell us a bit about Kui’s major contributions:

The rhetorical principles that The Rules of Writing promulgates include the importance of using clear and straightforward language, the primacy of meaning over form, and ways of arranging argument. These principles were, in large part, determined by the needs of the time… because The Rules of Writing was written at a time of great change in China. Two changes were of particular importance.

The first of China’s major changes was the advent of printing, which “made texts much more accessible and affordable than they had been before” (5). China’s second major societal change was the increasing number of people working for the government. As Kirkpatrick and Xu tell us, China’s hiring practices during this time shifted, which meant that people entered these civil service jobs through their own merit instead through inheritance or by privilege alone, which meant they needed to really have rhetorical skills to do the government’s work:

. . . The role of the civil service exams in ensuring only men of merit entered the civil service increased significantly… The Rules of Writing was written as a guide for men who wanted to enter a career in the civil service and who needed to pass the strict series of civil service exams in order to do so. (Kirkpatrick and Xu 5)

What we have received by way of the Greeks and Romans as rhetoric is just one version of a set of universal human activities related to thinking, talking, judging, writing, debating, and persuading each other. Every culture establishes expectations for communicating persuasively and appropriately. Traditions and cultural norms maintain expectations, but social change may disrupt these expectations or necessitate their evolution. For these reasons and more, the art of rhetoric is complex and fascinating to study.

Discussion: Rhetoric & Politics

Politics is rhetorical and rhetoric is political, but too often people use the terms interchangeably. Politics is about getting things done with groups of people, or, as Saylor Academy puts it: “Politics describes the use of power and the distribution of resources.” Since any political activity requires persuasion to get groups of people to share power and resources, politics usually relies on rhetoric. But politics may set aside persuasive strategies to find other ways to effect change. For example, law and war can be coercive instead of persuasive, and may be a part of how political decisions are enforced as opposed to decided on by two or more consenting parties.

We often hear that a senator or president or mayor is using rhetoric, as when someone says, “That kind of rhetoric is dangerous!” Rhetoric is also often misunderstood as “just talk.” You’ve probably heard people’s positions dismissed as “mere rhetoric.” This way of talking about rhetoric dismisses the power of words to implement change—through talking, writing, and creating. Talk is powerful stuff. It’s so powerful that there are whole disciplines devoted to understanding it (communication studies, education and teaching, literary criticism, philosophy, and, yes, rhetoric as a discipline). The next time you hear the word rhetoric used by politicians, political analysts, or in media editorials, think about their intention. Are they dismissing another person’s viewpoint by implying that it’s just a bunch of hot air? Are they implying that another person’s stated position on an issue is somehow inherently dangerous? Or do they use the word “rhetoric” in a way that indicates they really understand the tactics of persuasion that may be at work?

And yet, classical rhetoric certainly has political roots. The Greco-Roman tradition categorizes speeches into three categories, which include forensic, deliberative, and epideictic. Forensic has to do with making a believable case for what happened—as is the case when someone tries to prove their innocence to a jury by offering evidence for an alibi. Epideictic texts or speeches are for ceremony or show—to praise or to blame in ways that aren’t necessarily legally consequential. But the last speech type—the deliberative speech—has always been about getting an audience to adhere to a position on what actions should be taken. Deliberative rhetoric is clearly tied to politics and the “deliberate” drafting of legislation as one way of working with diverse groups of people. Of course, other aspects of our communication may be connected to politics in subtle ways. If someone writes an epideictic letter to a newspaper editor praising the life of former Texas governor Ann Richards, might we have some reason to take that praise as a public endorsement of Richards’ politics, too? Or if a nonprofit research team makes a forensic case that community access to arts and cultural events improves educational outcomes, we might read it as implying that arts should enjoy increased public funding. Politics, like rhetoric, is widespread and touches on nearly all aspects of our lives.

The relationship between rhetoric and politics is debatable, is itself a matter of discourse. One could argue that, because rhetoric always reflects or impacts our values, it always influences our politics. Or one could argue that human relation exists beyond the political and so too, therefore, does rhetoric.

What do you think?

Clarifying rhetoric vs. persuasion vs. argumentation

These three words are often used interchangeably for understandable reasons. It is important, however, to understand their distinctions:

“Persuasion” is the action or fact of persuading someone (or of being persuaded yourself) to do or believe something. It is to be convinced. Persuasion can be benign, like when dentists convince us to floss every day so that our gums and teeth stay healthy. Persuasion can be profitable, like when Apple designs opulent packaging with smooth dimensions and surfaces to convince us to only purchase their products. Persuasion can be malicious or harmful, like when cigarette companies knew their products were deadly and continued to sell/market them or when politicians convince us a group of humans is evil and their deaths justifiable.
“Argumentation” is the act or process of presenting reasons to convince someone of a particular argument (i.e. a claim or opinion). It is to make an assertion and prove it. Argumentation is embedded in persuasion and vice versa. For example, the dentist who persuades me to floss my teeth has made the arguments that 1) healthy gums and teeth are good and important and 2) that flossing keeps them healthy and has probably shown me images of improperly flossed mouths to convince me.
“Rhetoric” is how persuasion and argument work. It is their mechanic. “Persuasion” and “argumentation” are nouns that refer to acts; “rhetoric” is a noun that refers to the act’s technique, its strategy, its methodology, its way of being/doing. Rhetoric is the thoughtwork the dentist did to assemble her argument to persuade me to floss and also the words, stories, images, tone of voice, and facial expression she deployed. All persuasion and all argument is rhetorical; it is a matter of intense scholarly debate whether all rhetoric is persuasive or argumentative.

What is rhetorical analysis?

“Rhetorical analysis” refers to methods we use to understand the power of language, signs, and symbols. Just like scientists deploy theories of relativity and evolution to understand the way the physical world physically moves, develops, and changes and why, scholars in the humanities deploy rhetorical theory to understand how the world is developed, changed, and moved via language, signs, and symbols. Rhetorical analysis helps to understand texts composed by others’ and also helps us compose our own texts.

Because communication and communicative texts have manifold components and move in manifold spaces, rhetorical analysis has many pieces. In the next two chapters, we will break down the foundational parts of rhetorical analysis. We have also made available in the Student Resources section, a chapter called “The Art of Rhetoric” which includes more strategies for thinking critically and strategically about your own and others’ persuasion and argumentation. Here is an outline of rhetorical analysis’ foundational components before we begin:

Rhetorical Situation: context that shapes communication
Rhetorical Appeals: strategies speakers deploy through specific text elements, messages, and claims to reach their audience
Rhetorical Affects: how audiences respond and/or what a text does

The Rhetorical Situation

A key component of rhetorical analysis involves thinking carefully about the “rhetorical situation” of a text. We can understand the concept of a rhetorical situation if we examine it piece by piece, by looking carefully at the rhetorical concepts from which it is built. The philosopher Aristotle organized these concepts as speaker, audience, setting, purpose, and text. Answering the questions about these rhetorical concepts below will give you a good sense of your text’s rhetorical situation—the starting point for rhetorical analysis.

You can think of the rhetorical situation as the context or set of circumstances out of which a text arises. Any time anyone is trying to communicate, they are doing so within a particular context, one that influences and shapes the argument that is made. When we do a rhetorical analysis, we look carefully at how the rhetorical situation (context) shapes the rhetorical act (the text).

Identifying the rhetorical situation of a text requires critical thinking and research. We engage in this kind of thinking when we were are exposed to texts and also when we compose them. A marketing team, for example, conducts extensive research to identify and understand their target markets and target demographics. A research team applying for a grant is going to conduct research on the kinds of projects particular grant organizations fund, projects they have previously awarded, and criteria for their selections in order to choose the organizations to whom they submit and to compose their applications.

1. Speaker

The speaker of a text is the creator — the person who is communicating in order to try to effect a change in his or her audience. An author doesn’t have to be a single person or a person at all — an author could be an organization. To understand the rhetorical situation of a text, one must think about the identity and positionality of the author and their background.

What kind of experience or authority does the author have in the subject about which he or she is speaking?
What are the speaker’s values and beliefs? What are their material and/or ideological investments?
What communities or groups is the speaker part of? Who do they speak for? Who do they align themselves with?
Is the author trustworthy? What is their character? What is their history?

Knowing more about who the speaker is helps you know more about what their text and message is, who they intended to hear it, how they have composed it, and why. So how do you find out about speakers you are not familiar with and discover more about speakers you already know? Fortunately, we have the internet:

read their author bio, which is offered near the bottom of an article on most news and on “About” pages of blog websites. These blurbs usually contain information about speaker’s qualifications to talk about a thing, their background and experience, and their degrees, awards, or recognitions
you can Google the speaker, see what other digital spaces they occupy, and what they say in those spaces.
you can trace speakers’ social media presence, humans they follow, and groups they are affiliated with.
you can find interviews or podcasts they’ve done
you can find their “About Us” pages or mission statements on their website
you can find out what other people say about the speaker through news articles, blog posts, comments, and more
most website contain information about who has sponsored or built a page at the bottom. There will often be an organization, corporation, or institution cited there with links to those entities’ websites. Finding out who paid for a thing sometimes tells you more than the single author listed at the top of the page.

Beyond the internet, you can go to the library to research a speaker. You can find records in local and government archives. You can also talk to other humans who know more about them. All of this constitutes researching a source. These are things many of us already do. When you apply for a job and the application asks for references? That’s the company researching you as the applicant as a speaker: talking to someone who knows you and can attest to the kind of person you are and the kinds of skills and experience you have.

Doing this kind of research to answer these kinds of questions matters. This is an important skill and practice not only in the classroom, but any time you are accessing information as it will help you parse what sources are reliable, what sources might be intentionally misleading, and what sources are genuinely trying their best. Keep in mind, there is no such thing as an unbiased speaker. We are all invested in our own interests. We all have histories and bodies that shape our perspectives. We all desire outcomes that benefit ourselves and our families and our friends and our communities. Understanding what motivates speakers, what knowledge and experience they have, and what they are willing to do to achieve their ends helps us know who we should listen to and who we should trust.

Discussion: Student Strategies

What do you already do to find out more about the speakers of texts you encounter in your daily lives? What strategies do you have for figuring out whether a source is trustworthy?

Exercise: Researching the Speaker’s Positionality

Positionality is a feminist concept that allows writers to identify, as Myfanwy Franks defines, “the way in which individual identity is positioned by others” (42). When we write, we need to determine the positionality of our audience and ourselves. Recognizing our positionality means acknowledging that our experiences can influence our perspective, expectations, and understanding in the situations we encounter. To help you recognize your own positionality in a rhetorical situation, consider asking yourself how the factors of gender, race, class, ethnicity, sexuality, nationality, ability, age, religion, political affiliation, veteran status, and other life experiences might influence a situation.

Analyzing our own and others’ positionality can help us identify our stance toward a topic or situation. An author’s stance could influence how information is presented, and for what audience. Authors make choices about how and what information they write, so we can look for an author’s stance in the language of their writing. Language is evidence of stance because the style and substance of writing showcases the writer’s perspective.

Select a source you used in your Unit 2 Annotated Bibliography and then do some background research on the author of that source to determine their positionality. For instance, you might search to find:

The author’s current or past occupation
An online CV or resume for the author
Other publications by the author
Public social media commentary

Reflect on what you’ve found by asking yourself: what do my findings tell me about the stance of the author on the topic I am researching. Is their stance obvious or do they take a more objective approach? Why might that be?

Read the source again to look for evidence of the author’s stance. Respond to the following questions in your research journal:

What is this author’s stake in the topic
How does this author establish credibility (ethos) on this topic?
How does the author’s style of writing add to or align with their credibility?
What kind of voice does the author use and how does it impact my perception of them, their words, and my relationship to them?

2. Audience

In any text, an author is attempting to engage an audience. Before we can analyze how effectively an author engages an audience, we must spend some time thinking about that audience. An audience is a specific person or group the speaker is trying to reach and persuade with their message. The audience is never “the general public.” There is no such thing because publics are made of bodies who move, think, feel, interpret, believe, and speak differently. Consider toothpaste for a moment. Yes, “the public” writ large sees them. But different ads are designed to reach particular demographics: some target elderly consumers, using statistics of decay over time and dentures to convince them to buy a particular brand of toothpaste; meanwhile, some target kids with pink and blue sparkly toothpaste in tubes features their favorite characters. These different consumer audiences impact the design of the ads themselves and also when the corporation will pay for them to play on TV, on what channels, and during which shows. Marketing teams and companies spend millions of dollars researching how to reach their target audiences. Tech companies and creators have made billions mining and channeling precisely that kind of data for them.

Some texts have multiple intended audience. When a president gives a speech, they must find a way to reach all of the diverse people they represent. Traditionally, they endeavor to reach those they serve who voted for them and also those who did not. They must consider the needs, desires, and expectations of these different groups when they speak.

To understand the rhetorical situation of a text, we must examine who the intended audience is by asking these questions:

Who is the author addressing i.e. who is literally listening to or watching or reading this text? Sometimes this is the hardest question of all. We can get this information of “who is the author addressing” by looking at where an article is published or the venue through which communication took place. What audiences are likely to listen to Texas Public Radio? What audiences are likely to see a billboard in Waco along I-35? What audiences are likely to have a subscription to The San Antonio Express News? Who is most likely to be reading The Federalist blog page? Who hears a Presidential Address? Be sure to pay attention to the newspaper, magazine, website, or journal title where the text is published. Often, you can research that publication to get a good sense of who reads that publication. You can also better identify audience by researching a text’s historical, political, or cultural setting.
What is the audience’s demographic information (age, gender, etc.)? Texts give you clues about who their audience is. Who does the text’s voice sound similar to? What community does its diction reflect? What kinds of people are pictured in the ad? What references are made and who is likely to recognize those references? You can also, of course, return to researching the speaker, find their mission or company statements, and who they imagine their consumer or listener to be.
What is/are the background, values, interests of the intended audience? This is where you might have to start researching once you have determined who the audience is.
How open is this intended audience to the author or their message? What are their pre-existing stances, expectations, and desires? More research. Fortunately, you can locate a lot of this information by readings comments sections, reviews, and viewing text/content created by audiences. You can also – again, shocking – talk to people who are the intended audience and find out how they feel and what they think.

Something to keep in mind: YOU are often part of the intended audience. And if you have encountered a text, you are part of the audience, intended or not. How you respond to a text matters. This does not mean everyone is going to respond like you, but it means you are part of the conversation and it means you can gauge how a text might affect audiences with bodies, histories, and communities like yours.

Practice: Considering Audience

Complete the following short writing tasks:

Prompt 1: You’re running late to an important lunch with your boss and you need to send a text message to tell them you are late. What do you write?

Prompt 2: You’re running late to an important lunch with your mom and you need to send a text message to tell them you are late. What do you write?

Prompt 3: You’re running late to an important lunch with your best friend and you need to send a text message to tell them you are late. What do you write?

Now compare how you composed your message to these three different audiences. How does your voice change? What words are different? Punctuation? Capitalization? How did you leverage text messaging as a medium differently? With whom did you use emojis, memes, or GIFs? What do these rhetorical choices reflect about your different relationships with your different audiences?

3. Setting/Context

Nothing happens in a vacuum, and that includes the creation of any text. Essays, speeches, photos, political ads — any text — are written in a specific time and/or place by specific humans for specific humans, all of which affect the way the text communicates its message. To understand the rhetorical situation of a text, we can identify the particular occasion or event that prompted the text’s creation at the particular time it was created.

- Was there a debate about the topic that the author of the text addresses? If so, what are (or were) the various perspectives within that debate?
- Did something specific occur that motivated the author to speak out?
- What was happening historically, socially, and culturally at the time the text was created?

Matters of time help us understand a text’s exigence–the motivation for its creation.

Another important aspect of text setting is circulation–how a text moves across different spaces and how its meanings/affects/messages change as it moves. Social media has shown us how a text, written in a specific time and place, can take on new meaning as it circulates to different places at different times. Twitter posts that originally appeared on that platform can now be quoted in news articles, television programs, and even other social media sites, causing the text to take on new meaning as it circulates to new contexts. In the social media age of the internet, context shifts depending on how and where a text circulates.

To think about how texts circulate in culture is to consider how they get written, how they get shared, and how the meanings they carry move with them as they travel from context to context. These days such texts often include images, sound, and video, as well as words (for example, multimodal texts), and as the internet grows and expands, the circulation of texts, genres, and meaning all speed up, changing our writing and rhetorical practices in the process.

There are many ways to think about how texts circulate, from the posts we share online, to the memos we exchange at work, to the larger world of the public internet where texts and information circulate globally. Traditional print newspapers and magazines have long tracked their circulation and subscribers. However, in the digital spaces of the global internet, our experience of how writing and rhetoric move has radically changed, not only in how we write and communicate with friends and family, but also in the ways ideas flow through cultures and give shape to professional and public discourse about problems that matter.

Example: Meme Genre & Circulation

To illustrate how textual circulation works, let’s look at a quick example of a genre that exemplifies how texts circulate in modern writing environments: memes.

Nowadays, memes come in many forms and genres, but one of the most common kinds is what is known as the “advice animal image macro,”as seen in Image 1. Most of us are familiar with this kind of meme. Advice animal image macros like “success kid” are common memes that use the same image but add a different phrase at the top and bottom of the image. In the case of “success kid,” the top phrase states a problem (“Get sick on Friday”), and the bottom phrase states a serendipitous outcome (“Three day weekend”).

A meme of the success kid. — Image 1. Success kid gets sick on a Friday.

Like all memes, “success kid” has a history of development and circulation. The original image was taken in 2007 by Lindey Griner of her 11-month-old son Sammy and posted to Flickr to share with family (Image 2). The “I hate sandcastles” image was the first image meme to be circulated that used the little boy’s image (Image 3). Others soon picked up on the 2007 image and began altering it for their own rhetorical purposes. By 2008, the image was used by dozens of other people to convey either a sense of frustration, as in “I hate sandcastles,” or a feeling of unexpected success, giving birth to the now well-known “success kid” meme (Images 4 and 5).

Today, thousands of image macros have been spun from this original image, and “success kid” memes continue to circulate online as other meme creators draw on the shared meaning of the meme in new contexts. Thus, when considering textual circulation, we are looking at how texts get composed, how they reference and borrow meaning from each other, where they go, and the meanings they carry as they circulate.

4. Purpose

The author’s purpose connects the text with the context and the audience. Looking at a text’s purpose means looking at the author’s motivations for creating it. The author has decided to start a conversation or join one that is already underway. Why has he or she decided to join in? Are they trying to inform their readers of something? To convince them of something? To motivate them to do something? To determine the purpose of a text, look closely at the following text features and clues

1. Analyze and research the context:

Speaker: Who is speaking, what is their background, and what other texts have they made? Identifying common themes in speaker messaging can help you determine their goals.
Genre: Is it a novel, a news article, a poem, or a set of instructions? The genre can provide initial clues about the author’s intention.
Audience: Who is the text intended for? A scholarly journal targets experts, while a children’s book targets a younger audience.
Tone and Style: Is the language formal or informal? Does the author use emotional appeals or present factual evidence?
Publication Date and Source: When and where was the text published? This can reveal historical or social context.
Format: Is it a printed book, a webpage, or an email? The format can also offer clues about the author’s purpose.

2. Analyze the Text Itself:

Main Idea: What is the central point the author is trying to convey?
Supporting Evidence: Does the author use facts, data, personal anecdotes, or other evidence to support their claims?
Language and Tone: Pay attention to the words used, especially those with strong connotations. What emotions or reactions is the author trying to evoke?
Structure and Organization: How is the text organized? Does it follow a specific pattern or structure that reveals the author’s purpose?
Call to Action: Does the text encourage the reader to do something, believe something, or feel a certain way?

3. Keep in mind common text purpose:

In the textbook Writing Today, Johnson-Sheehan and Paine discuss purpose more specifically in terms of the author of a text. They suggest that most texts written in college or in the workplace often fill one of two broader purposes: to be informative or to be persuasive. Under each of these two broad purposes, they identify a host of more specific purposes. The following table is not exhaustive; authors could easily have purposes that are not listed on this table.

Table: Author Purposes from Purdue OWL

Informative

Persuasive

to inform

to persuade

to describe

to convince

to define

to influence

to review

to argue

to notify

to recommend

to instruct

to change

to advise

to advocate

to announce

to urge

to explain

to defend

to demonstrate

to justify

to illustrate

to support

(Johnson-Sheehan & Paine 17)

5. Text

“Text” refers to any form of communication, primarily written or oral, that forms a coherent unit, often as an object of study. A book can be a text and a speech can be a text. Social media posts, commercials, photographs, YouTube videos, clothing, food packaging, websites, and emails are all also texts.

Texts are made of elements or components. Elements range from the content the speaker chooses to include to specific words or sounds they deploy to overall tone and syntactical style they create to the arrangement of information and paragraphs to the formatting of a page. In the next chapter, we will talk more about identifying specific elements and components and thinking about how they work. We will also talk about rhetorical devices, specific kinds of text components recognized as useful to communication, persuasion, and argumentation.

Medium and genre are important feature of texts that influence or shape their other elements and their audiences. Medium refers to the media source or interface through which we communicate or receive a message or messages. Examples of media (the plural of medium) include newspapers, paintings, radio shows, podcasts, billboards, social-media apps, Zoom, or your course learning management system. In a sense, media are the materials that lie between the communicator and the communication. Different medium and genre forms are made of different text elements. For example, a newspaper article is going to be made primarily of words, their arrangement, their format, and the inclusion of charts, graphs, or photographs. A podcast is going to be made of words and also voices, intonations, sound effects, and music. A speech is going to made of words, voices, intonations, hand gestures, facial expressions,

To better understand a creator’s choice of medium, you might ask the following questions:

- In what medium is the text being made: image? written essay? speech? song? protest sign? meme? sculpture?
- What is gained by having a text composed in a particular format/medium?
- What limitations does that format/medium have?
- What opportunities for expression does that format/medium have (that perhaps other formats do not have?)

Again, research is often necessary to get to the answers to these questions and understand a text’s rhetorical situation.

Practice: The Rhetorical Situation

Let’s begin exploring the rhetorical situation with a situation close to home. Take a few minutes to think or free write in order to remember a reasonably serious conversation you’ve had recently with a family member or friend. The subject of the conversation doesn’t matter much. You might choose a time you had an argument, either about an important matter, something that always crops up as an issue in your relationship. It’s also fine to focus on mundane, everyday issues, perhaps a dispute about whose turn it was to wash the dishes or to choose the restaurant. You don’t have to choose an argument. What about the time you shared really good news with family or friends? Think of conversations about favorite books, films, or after an exciting basketball game. Whatever you choose, make sure the conversation was with someone you know well about a common interest. Now share your reflections with classmates and others by working through these questions

What was the topic of the conversation?
What was the purpose of the conversation?
Who was your primary audience?
What was the purpose of the conversation?
What was my audience’s opinion toward the topic?
What kinds of background information did you need to provide to your audience?
What kinds and how specific were the details in your conversation?
What was your tone, style of delivery? What words did you use?

Taking into account your audience’s needs, opinions, and attitudes before writing allows you to create a document that is more understandable. With this information now in mind, what could have been changed in the conversation you recounted here to make the purpose of that discussion clearer or your point more understood by the person with whom you were communicating?

Helpful Resources

Want to learn more? We recommend checking out a few more articles if you’d like to learn more about rhetoric:

Attributions

“Virtual Communication” (COMM543 – 21ST CENTURY COMMUNICATION), Steve Covello, CC BY-NC 2.0.

“Breaking Down an Image,” Jenna Pack Sheffield, CC BY-NC-ND 4.0, https://writingcommons.org/authors/jenna-pack-sheffield/.

“Types of Rhetorical Modes,” Lumen Learning, CC BY-SA, https://courses.lumenlearning.com/boundless-writing/chapter/types-of-rhetorical-modes/

“What is the Rhetorical Situation?,” Robin Jeffrey and Emilie Zickel, CC BY 4.0, https://pressbooks.ulib.csuohio.edu/csu-fyw-rhetoric/chapter/rhetorical-situation-the-context/.