~~ An Overview of the
Rhetorical Situation ~~
Soon we'll discuss the writing process, because I want you to begin to see the
writing you do for school that way—as something refined that takes shape over
the course of time and through many steps, some of which involve hard work. In
addition, it makes sense to talk about process at the beginning, because it's
something you can apply to each essay you write, whether for this or any class,
no matter the content or the purpose.
Some generic steps that individual
writers can adopt to their own style:
1. GENERATING IDEAS
(brainstorming, freewriting, clustering, using
questions, outlining)
2. WRITING A ROUGH DRAFT. (keep
it rough, bang it out, let the creative juices flow)
3. REVISE (improve effectiveness by sharpening the focus, adding
development, adjusting organization, improving structure and style)
4. EDITING (fixing grammar, punctuation, spelling, conventions, typos)
5. PROOFREAD (catch your typos, make sure your corrections are made)
You also need to consider the
overall purpose of the writing that you do.
Watching the Eagles game one
Sunday, I was surprised to hear the commentators mention "rhetoric."
One of the players from UCAL-Berkeley had a degree in rhetoric, and John Madden
couldn't figure out what that was. Ha, ha. They made fun of it for some
minutes. ("Isn't rhetoric just what we do all the time? Isn't it just
'talking'? )
Well, in a way, it is. He wasn't
far from it. Actually, rhetoric, defined by the dictionary last time I looked,
is the "art of speaking or writing effectively." So rhetoric isn't
just talking, it's talking well. As in, making a speech and getting people to
listen to you and agree with you. Or getting them to vote for
you. Or getting them on your side. Or getting them to donate money to your cause. And by the
same token, rhetoric isn't just writing, it's writing well.
And that's what we're about in
this class. Figuring out strategies for writing well.
And we'll use things (I've already mentioned them) like rhetorical strategies.
There's that word again. It makes sense now. They simply mean strategies for
writing effectively—in this case, strategies for developing your ideas so that
they fully communicate to readers.
Most writing textbooks advise
students who want to write effectively to become aware of the "rhetorical
situation" (that word again). The rhetorical situation is, simply, those
factors present at the time of writing which effect communication and therefore
those factors which writers must be aware of if they're to write well. The
rhetorical situation involves three key players: the WRITER, the AUDIENCE, and
the PURPOSE of the writing.
The Rhetorical Situation
THE WRITER
Who are you? What persona you want to project in your
writing? Do you want your readers to see you as someone who's serious, someone
who's laid back, someone who has a cause, someone who has a beef, someone who is intensely involved, someone who maintains
objective distance? Who are you in this paper? If you're not there at all, pick
something else to write about, until you have a topic you want be involved
with. How will you project this person to the reader, since we only have the
words on the page to help us know you? What kind of "voice" do you
want to use? Will it be intimate and personal, warm and funny, clever and
ironic, glib, self-deprecating? Will you use formal language, casual language,
street language, slang, professional jargon? It may be decided for you by the
assignment at hand. If so, you want to maintain the appropriate voice in your
writing, and the first step is figuring out who the voice will be in your
paper. It's usually the voice of a piece of writing that makes the biggest
impression on the reader. It's what gives us the impression there's a human
being behind those typeset letters. We connect with the human being, not the
million dollar words or the correct grammar, although it's nice when those are
there, too.
THE AUDIENCE
Another important piece of the puzzle, the rhetorical situation, is figuring
out who will be reading your paper. Who is your target audience? This can make
a huge difference when it comes to both the style and the content of your
paper. If I'm writing a piece about the Richard Thompson concert I saw last
week (I wish), then what I write is partly determined by who my audience is. If
I'm writing for a young audience, I might focus on reviewing not only the
musical aspect of the concert but the general atmosphere, describing the
"scene." My style would probably be casual and I might use a lingo or
references familiar to a younger crowd. But if I'm writing for the Wall St.
Journal, I might go for more of a business angle. What kind of profit has the
tour produced? How are Thompson's records selling? And my style would be more
objective, certainly no slang. On the other hand, if I'm writing for Acoustic
Guitar (a monthly magazine), I might focus on the instruments Thompson is
currently playing-the types of guitars, their unique sound-or I might focus on
his playing style, or his style through the years. If I'm writing for the ASCAP
(a songwriter's union) Newsletter, I might discuss Thompson's new record label
(supposing he had one) or his recording contract, his publishing rights or
royalties, whether he's been a successful, profitable act.
THE PURPOSE
Any time you sit down to produce a piece of writing, you have to ask, (1) who
am I in this piece, and (2) who am I writing to, BUT you also have to ask: what
am I trying to accomplish? What is my purpose? There are several ways to
describe a writer's purpose. I've come to use these three because I find them
sensible, useful. When I try to define my purpose, I'm asking myself whether,
specifically, I am trying to be expressive, objective (expository), or
persuasive.
WRITING WITH AN EXPRESSIVE PURPOSE
If you have an expressive purpose you want to reveal
or share something about yourself. You are inviting the reader into your heart
and/or mind and share your thoughts, feelings, beliefs, etc. If you chose to do
an expressive essay, for instance, on the topic of freedom, you may have wanted
to describe something specific like an event, a person, or a feeling you
remember. And you may have needed to explain a few things along the way, but
your overriding purpose was get yourself onto that
paper. You were baring your soul, more or less. And though you may wonder if in
the end it will be interesting to readers, you do it anyway, in the hope that
your reader will in some way relate to those feelings, those thoughts, those experiences. You hope that reading about your
experiences will be beneficial to your readers in some way. Maybe there's a
lesson you've learned, an insight you've had, a unique way of looking at the
world you want to share, a quirky but engaging perspective this experience has
given you. Maybe you have a desire to influence others in some way by relating
your experience, but you don't want to argue or persuade.
If you had an expressive purpose
for the "freedom" assignment, You may have
written something like:
All of these topics invite
personal, expressive stories that come from the writer's recent or remembered
experience. These topics are ready to be recalled and related into vivid,
descriptive, engaging prose that readers can consume with interest because they
are human, too. You may write something they can relate to, and that they
appreciate hearing from another person. You may be the one to give voice to a
feeling someone previously had trouble articulating.
The rhetorical strategies you use
to develop expressive essays tend to be description and narration. The style
that's usually appropriate is 1st person (I, me, my, myself, etc.) because you want
the reader to focus on you. The first person point of view helps you achieve
that.
While we're on the subject of
"point of view," consider the difference between these two
statements:
[1] I thought his speech was
horrible.
[2] His speech was horrible.
In the first statement, the 1st
person point of view, the "subjective style," places the emphasis on
what the writer thinks, and no justification is really necessary; the
reader is probably willing to extend the benefit of the doubt because
everyone's entitled to an opinion, and expressive essays are all about sharing
opinions, thoughts, feelings, experiences, etc. However, in the slightly
different second statement, the third person, or "objective style"
places the emphasis is on the speech, and if the writer doesn't provide
justification, the reader is bound to lose patience with the writer who just
likes to mouth off opinions that sound objective without backing them up. So
the writer has to EXPLAIN--the speech was horrible BECAUSE it went on too long,
was composed of cliché after tired cliché, was full of empty, undeliverable
promises, and seemed targeted at people who aren't intelligent enough to ask
simple, critical questions, like, "If you are pro-education, why have you
consistently voted to lower the budget for educational programs that might help
bring experienced teachers to inner-city schools?" So this 3rd person
point of view, this "objective style," which EXPLAINS, is more
appropriate for an objective purpose.
WRITING WITH AN OBJECTIVE PURPOSE
When you write with an objective
purpose, you are usually trying to explain, analyze, inform, or objectively
interpret something (you can subjectively, or expressively, interpret things,
as well).
If you had an expressive purpose
for the "freedom" assignment, you might have arrive
at a topic like one of these:
These topics invite the reader to
follow along as the writer explains what he/she means by the idea expressed.
The paper will likely stay focused on the ideas discussed,
and rarely, if ever, get personal.
Other objective kinds of topics
might be:
Or you may want to inform:
Or you may want to interpret:
In each case, you are maintaining
some objective distance from your topic, and the purpose of your writing has
shifted from expressive to expository--from writing that's focused on you, the
writer, to writing that's focused on ideas, subject matter. Notice the absence
of 1st person references in these examples. They are all written in the 3rd
person to keep attention on the subject matter and not on the writer.
Several strategies in addition to
narration and description can help you develop objective, expository writing:
WRITING WITH A PERSUASIVE PURPOSE
When you write with a persuasive
purpose you're trying to convince your readers to change their minds about
something. You may even be trying to get them to act in a way they wouldn't
have before. Sometimes it's not enough to simply express or explain your point
of view--you want to change somebody's mind or their behavior. Both of these
goals may be very difficult to reach. Just try to think of the last time you
convinced someone that you were right in a disagreement. Wasn't it hard?
Parents fight this good fight all the time, trying to convince their children
to listen to them! Unless you're comfortable being a tyrant, you struggle with
it, trying to convince through logic and reasoning. Of course it never works
with kids! But it's supposed to...
Persuasion is a powerful life
skill. And when you think about it, you're bombarded with persuasive messages
every day in the form of advertisements. Politicians advertise themselves. Buy
me, vote for me. It's an endless mantra in
But as Americans we also live in a
free (supposedly), democratic (supposedly) society in which issues can be and
are debated, and rational arguments are put forth by
responsible people who have the public interest in mind. And it's the citizen's
duty to consider these arguments and decide which is the more rational and
sane, which has the stronger logical stance, and the most compelling evidence.
The citizen has the last say.
If you can understand an argument,
if you can recognize when you ought to be persuaded and when you ought not be persuaded, then you can construct one as well. Or
perhaps it's the learning to construct a sound argument that best teaches you
how to recognize one.
In either case, when you write
persuasively, you are attempting to blend the expository mode (explaining,
informing, analyzing, interpreting) with an
argumentative strategy--stating your claim, defending it with logical reasoning
and various kinds of evidence, anticipating counterarguments and refuting them.
You are always focused on readers who disagree with you, trying to find
convincing evidence that will persuade them to change their minds, trying to
ease them down a new road with a logical line of reasoning.
An argumentative topic based on
the "freedom" assignment may have sounded something like this:
These topics are each debatable in
some way. The writer tries to win the debate through logical reasoning and
evidence, resorting to emotional appeals only as a supplement to sound
reasoning, never as the main show.
Course
Information
WRT 120 Syllabus
Lit 165 Syllabus
About the
Instructor
Notes for Effective Writing I
Understanding the 'Rhetorical
Situation'
Writing
Descriptively
What Makes a Good
Story?
Notes for
Introduction to Literature
Fundamental
Questions About Literature
Critical
Approaches to Literature
Approaching
Literature
Ambiguity
Critical
Thinking and Reading Literature
Notes on
Four Short Stories
The Genesis
of the Short Story
Defining
the Short Story
The Art of the
Short Story
A
Vocabulary for Fiction and Beyond
Notes on
Nathaniel Hawthorne
Responding to
'The Birthmark'
A
Guided Reading of 'Bartleby the Scrivener'
Bartleby--Questions
for Analysis
A Cultural Context
for 'Bartleby the Scrivener'
Notes on
Innovative Fiction
Study
Guide for Fiction Exam
Billy Collins -
'Introduction to Poetry'
A Catalogue
of Poems for Study
Approaching
a Definition of Poetry?
Reading
Poetry
The Craft
of Poetry: Imagery
Readings
from 'The United States of Poetry'
The Craft of
Poetry: Sound
The Craft
of Poetry: Structure
Lines of
Continuity
Study
Guide for Poetry Exam
The Birth of
Drama
On Tragic Character
Stepping
Through 'Oedipus the King'
Analyzing
'Oedipus the King'
The Relevance 'Oedipus'Today
Study
Guide for the Drama Exam
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