Rhetorical Situations

Every time you sit down to write anything – an essay, an email, a text – you confront a unique rhetorical situation. Think about it. It isn’t natural to scrawl a pen across a piece of paper, to press forty-four buttons on a keyboard with your fingers repeatedly, or to move your your thumbs up and down on a screen repeatedly. These are not comfortable postures or actions for human beings. There must be exigence. You have to have motivation. All writing has a motive behind it.

So you have to ask yourself, “What is my motivation? Why am I doing this?

Once you figure that out, the elements of the rhetorical situation will reveal themselves:

• The Writer
• The Purpose.
• The Audience.

The chapters in this section discuss those elements and how they interact with each other.