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part 1

Rhetorical
Situations
Whenever we write, whether its an email to a friend or
a toast for a wedding, an English essay or a rsum,
we face some kind of rhetorical situation. We have a
PURPOSE, a certain AUDIENCE, a particular STANCE, a GENRE,
and a MEDIUM to consider and often as not a DESIGN. All
are important elements that we need to think about
carefully. The following chapters offer brief discussions
of those elements of the rhetorical situation, along with
questions that can help you make the choices you need
to as you write. See also the fifteen GENRES chapters for
guidelines for considering your rhetorical situation in
each of these specific kinds of writing.

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Rhetorical Situations

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PURPOSE

AUDIENCE

GENRE

STANCE

MEDIA / DESIGN

3
5

9
12
15

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Purpose

All writing has a purpose. We write to explore our thoughts and emotions,
to express ourselves, to entertain; we write to record words and events,
to communicate with others, to try to persuade others to believe as we do
or to behave in certain ways. In fact, we often have several purposes at
the same time. We may write an essay in which we try to persuade an
audience of something, but as we write, we may also be exploring our
thoughts on the subject. Look, for example, at this passage from a 2002
New York Times Magazine essay by economist and editorial columnist Paul
Krugman about the compensation of chief executive officers:
Is it news that C.E.O.s of large American corporations make a lot of
money? Actually, it is. They were always well paid compared with the
average worker, but there is simply no comparison between what executives got a generation ago and what they are paid today.
Over the past 30 years most people have seen only modest salary
increases: the average annual salary in America, expressed in 1998 dollars (that is, adjusted for inflation), rose from $32,522 in 1970 to $35,864
in 1999. Thats about a 10 percent increase over 29 years progress, but
not much. Over the same period, however, according to Fortune magazine, the average real annual compensation of the top 100 C.E.O.s went
from $1.3 million 39 times the pay of an average worker to $37.5
million, more than 1,000 times the pay of ordinary workers.
The explosion in C.E.O. pay over the past 30 years is an amazing story
in its own right, and an important one. But it is only the most spectacular indicator of a broader story, the reconcentration of income and wealth
in the U.S. The rich have always been different from you and me, but
they are far more different now than they were not long ago indeed,
they are as different now as they were when F. Scott Fitzgerald made his
famous remark.
Paul Krugman, For Richer

handbook

media/
design

research
mla/apa

processes

genres

strategies

rhetorical
situations

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