AP English Language and Composition

Every piece of writing is produced by someone, for someone, at a particular moment, and for a reason. The **rhetorical situation** is the name for that whole set of circumstances, and it is made up of six parts: the exigence, the purpose, the audience, the writer, the context and the message. A reader who can name all six for a text has explained why it was written the way it was, and a writer who has decided all six before drafting has most of the strategic choices already made. ## Exigence The **exigence** is whatever inspires, stimulates, provokes or prompts a writer to create a text. It is the problem, event, question or need that makes writing worthwhile at this moment. A town council voting to close a library branch is an exigence for a letter to the editor; so is a new study on sleep in teenagers, a speech that someone finds unfair, or a school's decision about phones. Exigence is not the same as the subject. The subject of the letter is libraries, and the exigence is the vote that makes the subject urgent. Some texts state their exigence in the opening lines ("Last week the council voted..."). Others leave it implied, and the reader has to infer it from the details the writer chooses to mention. ## Purpose The **purpose** is the goal a writer has for the text, the effect the writer wants it to have on readers. A text may aim to inform, to persuade, to change a belief, to move an audience to act, to entertain, to honor someone, to argue for a policy, or to explain a…