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 puzzle. Writers often have more than one purpose at once. A column about a local flood might inform readers of what happened, persuade them that the drainage budget is too small, and move them to attend a meeting.

When describing a purpose, use a verb that says what the text does to its reader, and be specific. "To persuade" is true of nearly every argument and says little. "To persuade parents that a later start time would help teenagers concentrate" says what the writer wants and from whom.

Audience

The audience is the person or group the text is meant to reach. An audience has shared beliefs, values, needs and backgrounds, and also individual ones, so a group of retired teachers shares some assumptions and still contains people who disagree. Writers form a picture of their audience and let it guide their choices of evidence, tone, vocabulary and organization. The audience a writer intends is not always the audience that actually reads the text, and a good analysis stays with the audience the writer was addressing.

Audiences are also dynamic: a reader who is hostile at the start of an essay may be neutral by the end, and the writer's early paragraphs are often built to move them. An audience may be a single reader, as in a letter, a specific group, as in an address to a graduating class, or a broad public, as in a newspaper essay.

Writer

The writer is the person or voice that produces the text, and what matters for analysis is what the writer brings to the subject: expertise, experience, a position in a debate, a relationship to the audience. A nurse writing about hospital staffing carries a different authority from a hospital administrator writing on the same topic, and each knows that readers will weigh the claims accordingly. Writers sometimes adopt a persona, a constructed voice, such as the calm expert, the worried neighbor or the plain-spoken skeptic, because that voice suits the purpose. The persona may be close to the writer's real self or a long way from it.

Context

The context is the time, place and occasion in which the text is written and received. A speech given at a funeral, an editorial printed the morning after an election, and a blog post written during a heat wave each draw on their moment. Context includes the larger conversation too: what has already been said about the subject, what readers know, and what they are likely to be thinking about. A claim that sounds bold in one decade may sound ordinary in another, and an analysis that ignores the date can miss why a writer felt the need to argue something that now seems obvious.

Message

The message is the writer's central idea about the subject, the thing the whole text communicates. It is the claim the writer is making, which in a formal argument is the thesis. The message is not just the topic. "Urban gardens" is a topic; "city governments should lease empty lots to community gardeners because gardens strengthen neighborhoods at low cost" is a message.

Reading a rhetorical situation in a text

A short example shows how the parts work together. Imagine this paragraph, written as an example.

After Tuesday's meeting, the district announced that the school pool will close in June. I swam on that team for three years, and I can tell you that the pool is where half of us learned we could be good at something. A building like that does not appear on a budget line as anything but a cost, so someone has to say what it is worth.

The exigence is the announcement of the closure. The writer is a former team member, and uses that to speak with experience. The audience is probably the local community, including people who vote on the budget and people who might attend the next meeting. The purpose is to persuade readers that the pool has value beyond its cost, and perhaps to move them to speak up. The context is a budget decision made on a specific Tuesday, and the message, so far, is that the pool is worth more than the budget records show.

When analyzing a real text, work through the parts in the order the text makes them visible, and then ask how each part explains a choice. The writer's experience explains why the paragraph opens with a personal claim. The audience explains why it speaks in terms of budgets. The context explains why it is urgent. An analysis that connects a feature of the text to a part of the situation is explaining the writer's choice, which is more useful than listing the features.

How the parts shape each other

The parts are linked, and a change in one changes the others. If the same writer addressed current students instead of voters, the purpose might shift to encouragement, the evidence would become more personal, and the tone would be warmer and less formal. If the occasion were a farewell ceremony at the pool, the exigence would be the closing itself, and the message might shift toward honoring the pool instead of arguing for it. This is why an argument that works well in one situation can fall flat in another, and why writers think about the situation before choosing any evidence or style.