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Chapter 2 Understanding Rhetoric

Goal: To recognize essential components of rhetoric and understand why and how

a text works.

2.1: Understand what rhetoric really is 2.2: Understand five key components of rhetoric 2.3: Understand the rhetorical situation Chapter 2 Project: Write an essay evaluating how well a text responds to a rhetorical situation

If you instructor has assigned them, you can watch the videos for this chapter,

complete the Reflect and Apply activities, and work on the Chapter Project in Achieve.

2.1: Understand what rhetoric really is

Even if you’ve encountered the word rhetoric, it’s probably not a word you use regularly. These days, it

often gets mentioned when people are unhappy about the words someone has spoken. For example,

when a politician talks about something he or she will accomplish, a political opponent might say,

“That’s just empty rhetoric!” In this sense, rhetoric has a bad reputation. Too often, rhetoric is

associated with someone using language to unjustly elevate their own position or to make their

opposition look bad.

In truth, rhetoric is by itself neither innocent nor powerful. What matters is how people use it.

Rhetoric is the practice of conveying an effective message to an audience. Sounds simple, right? Well, it

is and it isn’t. Rhetoric is what allows people to express themselves clearly, understand one another, and

find solutions to common problems.

Examining the inspirational power of rhetoric Why do you need to know what rhetoric is and why it can be powerful? Because conveying messages is

what we all do every day of our lives. Even if you don’t consider yourself a rhetor—someone who uses

rhetoric—you are. You write emails, texts, social media posts, game chats, papers for school, and

countless other pieces at home, at work, and at play. When you use rhetoric in each of these situations,

you try to reach an audience and achieve a purpose. Maybe that purpose is to convince a friend that one

approach to solving a problem is better than another. Maybe you’re just trying to understand a different

perspective on a social issue. Or maybe you're just trying to create a connection with someone.

Transferring these communication skills that you already have to college reading and writing adds

another strategy to help you make meaning in the world around you.

We’ve said that rhetoric is the practice of conveying an effective message to an audience. To

consider just how meaningful that is and to see how people create connections with rhetoric, let's check

out some examples of rhetoric in action.

Neil Gaiman gives a powerful commencement speech. Speaking to the graduating class of 2012 at the

University of the Arts, writer Neil Gaiman encourages these aspiring artists to “make good art”

regardless of what life throws at them. He specifically connects to his audience—budding artists—by

elevating and valuing the work they want to pursue after graduation. With a good balance of humor and

seriousness, he says,

Husband runs off with a politician? Make good art. Leg crushed and then eaten by mutated boa

constrictor? Make good art . . . Someone on the Internet thinks what you're doing is stupid or evil

or it's all been done before? . . . Do what only you can do best. Make good art.

Watch the video of this part of his speech and listen to how well his remarks were received by his

audience.

VIDEO: https://bit.ly/2TNhWig

Hannah Brencher writes uplifting letters to strangers. After graduating from college, Hannah Brencher

fell into a depression. To try to heal herself, she began writing letters to strangers who she believed also

needed support—even if that support came from a stranger. She’d leave the letters all over town—on

park benches and subway trains—hoping that people would find them and their day would be brighter.

Eventually, she started a nonprofit organization called The World Needs More Love Letters

(www.moreloveletters.com) that sends bundles of handwritten letters to people nominated by their

friends and family. You can find videos of Brencher talking about the project and videos of people

receiving their letter bundles on YouTube.

Read the following excerpt from Brencher’s book If You Find This Letter to see how her mother’s

letter writing habit taught Hannah about the power of receiving a supportive love letter.

https://bit.ly/2TNhWig

As we waited for the train, I watched my mother wedge something into the belly of my

suitcase, with the hope I wasn’t looking. I tried to force myself to forget it was there. I fidgeted

and folded my ticket, waiting to leave. I knew it was a letter. It was always a letter.

My mother is a nostalgic creature. There are three things you should know about my

mother: The first is that she is always, somehow, the life of every party. The second is that any

person my mother has ever loved could tell you the exact way a kazoo sounds when it’s left in a

voice mail on your birthday. It’s nailed tight to my memories of growing up—watching her flip

through the pages of her address book and find the name of whoever it was she’d marked on

her calendar. I remember hearing the dialing of the cordless phone. My mother would wait. And

then the sound of a kazoo being played to the tune of “Happy Birthday” would stream

throughout the house.

The third thing to know about my mother is that she’s a nostalgic creature and I have to

believe she made me into one too. She’s hidden love letters for me to find all my life. There was

a note tucked on top of a piece of chocolate cake when heartbreak visited my freshman dorm

room for the first time. There was a card left on my dashboard the day after Whitney Houston

died. Confetti fell out from the inside. Musical notes skittered across the front. She wrote six

words to me in red Sharpie: And I will always love you. I am the product of my mother’s bread

crumb trails of love letters.

Every coming and going we’ve ever shared has been built up with letters, notes, trinkets,

and the like, as if tiny wedges of paper and confetti could keep a person always coming back.

She’d trailed tiny clues four years earlier as we moved me into my first dorm room. I found

letters tucked in plastic Tupperware bins and notes within books I hadn’t even opened yet.

Pieces of my mother would pop up and appear throughout the semester. In random classes. At

staff meetings. On retreats. My mother is an expert at leaving evidence she was here in the lives

of everyone around her.

One of the notes she mailed to me in my first week of college included a long quote

she’d copied from O, The Oprah Magazine while sitting in a waiting room of a doctor’s office.

The quote was about a mother and a daughter. The final point of release. The girl was leaving,

marching into adulthood without her mother’s steady hand to hold. The girl turned at the door

and the mother went to reach out, wanting to tell her daughter one last thing, but she pulled

back instead. It was that moment when the mother finally had to say, “I’ve given everything I

can and I have to trust it is enough. She must go out there and see and feel and understand the

rest on her own.”

The breath fell out of me when I read that quote for the first time. I kept reading it out

loud. I felt bare and exposed through my mother’s scratchy handwriting whenever I read it. The

card with the quote inside of it somehow got lost and my mother couldn’t remember what issue

of O she found it within. I spent the next summer going through every O magazine at the town

library, looking for any last evidence the paragraph ever existed, but I never found it. I’m still

looking.

The letters from my mother kept coming throughout college. I was one of the only

students who had a reason to go to their PO box at the end of the day, and that was mainly

because my mother didn’t have a cell phone or text messaging or any kind of social network to

check into. I’d told her a bunch of times she should get a cell phone but she only ever said the

same thing back to me: “I’ve gone over fifty years without anyone needing to find me. Why start

now?”

President Obama connects with Vietnamese female rapper. When world leaders make diplomatic trips

overseas, they typically meet with officials and host public appearances that include public speeches.

When President Barack Obama traveled to Vietnam in 2016, he hosted a town hall for the country's

youth. In the crowd, a twenty-six year old female rapper named Suboi asked a pointed question about

women producing hip hop music that criticized certain parts of Vietnamese society. Their exchange

included Suboi asking a question about free speech and rap music in a country with strict free speech

laws. President Obama answered her with, "Before I answer your question, why don't you give me a

little rap? Let's see what you got." This communication exchange conveyed a message from President

Obama that free speech was important and conveyed a message from Suboi that she was a voice for

that free speech. Take a look at that exchange in the following video.

VIDEO: https://bit.ly/2URJlzy

https://bit.ly/2URJlzy

REFLECT

Look for rhetoric in your everyday communication Now that you’ve seen that rhetoric exists all around us, think about the many ways you communicate in

your everyday life. When speaking face-to-face, we use non-verbal expressions and physical gestures

that give clues about the message we are trying to convey. When we text, abbreviations and emojis can

be a shared language. Even updating your status on Facebook or other social media sites is practicing

rhetoric.

Write a paragraph explaining the variety of ways you communicate in a typical day. How

effective are those communications? How do you know?

UNDERSTAND

Experience the power of rhetoric

Videos are multimodal forms of communication that can help us demonstrate how powerful rhetoric can

be. In September 2014, the rapper Prince Ea posted a video he created called “Can We Auto-Correct

Humanity?” on YouTube. Within three and a half years, it had over twenty million views. And as

TechTimes.com reported, “it garnered more than 150,000 shares within hours of its posting.”

The video is Prince Ea’s commentary on what he calls “media overstimulation.” In the video, he

laments that “touchscreens can make us lose touch” and suggests that Facebook ought to be called an

“anti-social network” because it sometimes prevents people from having true human connection.

Many who shared the video commented that it was an optimistic, uplifting message. It didn’t

motivate them to unplug from technology completely, but they claimed that it made them re-consider

their relationship to technology.

As you watch the video yourself, think about what makes its message so attractive to some

viewers.

VIDEO: https://bit.ly/1qRcEuZ

APPLY

Plan a rhetorically effective message

Now it's your turn to put your understanding of rhetoric into practice. If you wanted to communicate

your thoughts about the “Can We Auto-Correct Humanity” video Prince Ea produced, you would have to

think through a number of decisions:

1. What message would you want to convey? Would it be completely supportive, completely

unsupportive, or a mixed bag of response?

2. You’d need to think about the audience you’d want to reach. Who needs to hear your message?

Why that person or group?

3. What kinds of words and tone would you use?

4. You’d need to consider the form you’d want your message to take and how you would communicate

your message. If you’re trying to communicate with Prince Ea directly, is adding a comment to the

https://bit.ly/1qRcEuZ

thousands of comments already on the YouTube site the best way to reach him? Should you tweet

him? Should you research his management to get a mailing address and write a formal letter to him?

Write a paragraph or more explaining the message you would convey, the audience you’d hope to reach,

and the medium or form you’d use to reach that audience. Then, explain your rationale for those

choices.

2.2: Understand Five Key Components of Rhetoric Practicing rhetoric means you create texts in a particular way. You’re now composing not only with an

eye to what the text says, but also to focus on how the text works. How would a magazine article you

write engage its readers? If you owned a small business, how would you want to think about creating a

winning ad campaign? How would an award winning blogger decide what to write about for a specific

blog post? How does an activist raise awareness of a social cause? Writers use many strategies to create

and polish their messages, but to be effective, all writers must work with five key components of

rhetoric: purpose, audience, tone, genre, and context.

Considering Purpose, Audience, Tone, Genre, and Context

The five components of rhetoric work like individual pieces of a puzzle. Alone, they’re not very useful.

But when they are assembled well, they work together to create rhetoric.

● Purpose refers to the reason for creating a text and the goal the writer means to achieve. People

create texts for a wide array of purposes, including to make an argument, to offer social

commentary, to entertain, to reflect on an experience, and to conduct business.

● Audience refers to the intended or anticipated recipient(s) of the text or message. Audience and

purpose go hand-in-hand because the purpose can be achieved only if the message gets to the

appropriate audience.

● Tone refers to the attitude the text conveys: grateful, hostile, condescending, playful,

indifferent. Effective texts have tones that suit their purpose and audience.

● Genre refers to the form the text takes. Formal letters, blogs, magazine articles, emails, text

conversations, and even tweets are all examples of genres. For your writing to be rhetorically

effective, it should appear in a genre that will appeal to the targeted audience and allow the text

to achieve its purpose.

● Context refers to all the situations and backstories swirling around the text, including recent

events and previous exchanges between the author and this audience.

Using the five components of rhetoric to understand a text

Rhetorically approaching a text—and by “text,” we mean any kind of written communication—involves

asking a lot of questions about it. It’s a bit like seeing an illusionist pull off a mind-blowing trick, then

spending the rest of the evening asking your friends who were also at the show how he did it.

When you encounter a text and are trying to figure out its message, you have to consider all five

components of effective rhetoric and start asking questions. Answering these questions will help you

not only engage with a text but to understand its rhetorical effectiveness in conveying a message. Then,

when you compose a message, you will be able to ensure it is rhetorical.

● What’s the text’s purpose? What is this text trying to achieve? Why does it exist? What’s it

trying to accomplish? What does it want the audience to do or think after engaging with it? How

can I tell? What about the text clues me in to its purpose? What can I learn about the purpose

from the title or subheadings? What can I learn about the purpose from the content of the text

itself?

● Who is the text’s audience? How can understanding the purpose give me clues about who the

specific audience might be? Who is this text appealing to? How can I tell? Is the probable

audience hostile, friendly, or indifferent? What in the text gives me clues? Does anything in the

text—such as “My fellow Americans” or “Hi Facebook peeps!”—identify specific audience

members?

● What is the text’s tone? Given the purpose and audience you’ve identified, what kind of tone

would be appropriate? Formal? Casual? Hostile? Friendly? Considering those expectations can

help you look deeper into the tone to see if it matches your expectations. How does word choice

or formatting help set the tone? Do some words have a strong emotional resonance? If so, what

emotions do they evoke? Does the text include visual elements that contribute to the tone such

as written words in ALL CAPS or images that reinforce the text’s message?

● What is the text’s genre? Remember that genre is the form the message takes, like a meme, a

text message, web page, academic essay, or newspaper article. What’s the genre of the text

you’re encountering? What are some features of that genre? How do written words generally

appear? How are the words formatted? How are visuals typically used? What kinds of visuals are

typically used?

● What’s the context surrounding the text? What’s going on in the world or in the community

that may have prompted the writer to write? To what is the writer responding? What larger

conversation is going on that this text might contribute to?

REFLECT

Think about the five components of rhetoric

We’ve encouraged you to think about rhetoric as having five key components: purpose, audience, tone,

genre, and context. We’ve suggested that you approach a text by asking questions to understand how

these five components function together in a text. But we don’t expect that this all comes easily.

What component of rhetoric seems most difficult to grasp at this point? Reflect on this

component and write a short response about your concerns. What about it is confusing or makes you

wonder how you’d incorporate it in your own writing?

UNDERSTAND

See how the five components of rhetoric work together in a text

Now let’s take a look at how we can study a text to determine its purpose, audience, tone, genre, and

context. Later, you can use those skills to compose your own rhetorically effective writing. We’ve

annotated the following article to show you how it contains all five of the key components of rhetoric. As

you read, think about which parts of rhetoric you don’t yet deeply understand, and look to see how the

author uses them.

Foster School of Business, University of Washington

Growing Social Movements Through Reason, Not Disruption

The following article was published in 2015 on the Faculty Research page of the website of the

Foster School of Business, University of Washington. The purpose of the site is to promote the school and

to share news of faculty research with the university community and the general public. This article

focuses on research by assistant professor Abhinav Gupta, who had recently published a study on social

activism in a scholarly journal.

When campaigning for social change, disruptive protests may win a few battles, but

efforts to educate are more likely to win the war. (Audience: The writer states the main point of

Gupta’s research up front, in language that will be understood by the general public)

This according to new research by Abhinav Gupta, an assistant professor of strategic

management at the University of Washington Foster School of Business. (Purpose: This paragraph

hints at the article’s purpose: to explain Gupta’s research to people interested in the topic.)

Gupta’s study of the effectiveness of activist efforts indicates that disruptive tactics such

as protests and sit-ins can yield some immediate, localized success, but they do little to expand

the objectives of a cause more broadly.

Evidence-backed education efforts, on the other hand, prove more potent at persuading

even leaders of organizations not targeted by activists. By appealing to their rational decision-

making processes, activists can generate a spillover effect in their campaign for change.

This “contagion” can multiply their impact and grow a movement exponentially.

“Disruption plays a role in terms of raising attention and bringing awareness to an

issue,” says Gupta. “But if it’s used exclusively, it can turn off a lot of people and be very limited

in its effectiveness. We find that evidence-based education proves more effective at achieving a

campaign’s larger goals.”(Genre: The writer follows typical conventions of news articles, stating the

most important information in the opening paragraphs and using short paragraphs with interesting

quotations.)

Act locally, think globally

Racial equality. Environmental protection. Same-sex marriage. Gender pay equity. A living wage.

The list of causes that inspire people to organize for change is long and unending. (Context: The

writer acknowledges the larger social context that makes Gupta’s research relevant and timely.)

But the resulting campaigns for social change—often described as “grassroots” efforts—

typically have far fewer resources and capabilities than the organizations they endeavor to

influence.

So activists are forever calculating the way to maximally multiply their impact. Gupta

says that they often target a few influential organizations—universities, corporations,

government agencies—that are likely to set the standard for peer institutions.

A textbook example of this strategy is the “Rein in Russell” campaign engineered by a

group called United Students Against Sweatshops (USAS) in 2009.

To make progress toward its ultimate goal of improving working conditions in

developing countries, the group went after the apparel manufacturer Russell Athletic which had

recently closed a manufacturing facility in Honduras after efforts to unionize its 1,300 workers.

To pressure Russell to reopen a fully unionized plant, USAS targeted the company’s biggest

organizational customers: universities. Not all of them, but a select group of influencers.

Rein in Russell achieved success quickly. Within a year, the campaign reached critical

mass. More than 75 major universities pledged to cut ties with Russell if it didn’t reopen the

unionized factory. And the company gave in to growing financial pressure. (Tone: The writer

remains neutral and objective while describing events, as is appropriate for a news article.)

Hearts and minds

Gupta’s interest in Rein in Russell began while he was in graduate school at Pennsylvania State

University, where the campaign was born.

What he found most intriguing was that so many of the universities that got on board

came to this decision without even being targeted by activists.

How did they do it? What tactic triggered this spillover effect, this contagion to change

policies?

To find out, Gupta and co-authors Forrest Briscoe and Mark Anner analyzed the strategy

and tactics of the campaign, and interviewed activists and university administrators—from both

targeted and untargeted schools.

They learned that the USAS activists deployed two very different tactics to rein in

Russell: disruption and evidence-based education. They first tried disruption, acting on what

Gupta calls a longstanding intuition that localized protests expand impact by prompting

organizations to surrender pre-emptively.

So the students fomented protests and sit-ins, which persuaded a few of the targeted

universities to drop Russell. But they found that disruption and the threat of disruption did not

lead to anything like the domino effect they desired.

“We found that those tactics didn’t have a positive spillover effect,” Gupta says. “They

were effective where they were deployed. But peer universities that weren’t protested did not

join the cause. Their administrators would say that other universities did not make their decision

rationally, that they caved in to intimidation.”

What did get the ball rolling across the nation’s major universities was a change in

tactics. USAS organizers brought workers from Russell’s shuttered factory on a limited campus

tour to share their stories of abuse.

This new approach, Gupta says, was “purely intended to change minds and values.”

And it was hugely effective.

Know your target

Why did it work?

Gupta says the evidence-based tactics appealed to the sense of reason that drives

organizational decision making.

“Instead of justifying decisions in terms of right versus wrong, which is a question of

values and morality, organizational decision makers—university administrators and corporate

executives—work by the principle of rationality,” he says. “This is to say that there should be a

reason that you can justify for its service to organizational goals.”

Those goals may be maximizing profits or galvanizing reputation or recruiting the best

employees.

Gupta believes that knowing how to speak to these organizational goals is the key for

would-be agents of social change to multiply their local actions into global results.

He adds that organizations, for their part, can avoid some of the bad publicity and lost

productivity that are byproducts of disruptive demonstrations by proactively giving audience to

activist groups, hearing their concerns and communicating the reasoning behind organizational

policies and behaviors.

The place for protest

Though the study finds that education is one of the most effective social activist tactics in the

long term, Gupta says it also reveals that disruptive tactics have a role to play as well.

First, disruption can apply enough pressure to be locally effective. Beyond that, protests

and other disruptions can serve as a precursor for more broadly effective demonstrations of

education and reasoning. By drawing attention and raising awareness to the cause (if not

universal sympathy), they can pave the way for more rational messages to convince

organizational decision makers to change their policies.

“There is a place for disruption,” Gupta says. “Evidence-based tactics and disruption-

based tactics have a kind of good cop/bad cop dynamic. Disruption gets attention. Evidence and

persuasion change minds.”

APPLY

Practice rhetorical analysis

In Section 2.2 we’ve asked you to think about how purpose, audience, tone, genre, and context work

together to contribute to a text’s meaning and effectiveness. We’ve also showcased some of the ways

that the article “Growing Social Movements Through Reason, Not Disruption” demonstrates these key

elements of rhetoric.

Now we invite you to apply your new knowledge and skills to a different text on a similar topic.

Read the following article and answer the questions that follow about how the writer uses the five

components of rhetoric. (The notes you make here will help you complete the Chapter 2 Project.)

Sharon Cohen

Today’s Protests Rely on the Masses

Sharon Cohen is a reporter for the Associated Press. Based in Chicago, she writes frequently

about issues of criminal justice, police misconduct, gun violence, and legal matters. This story

originally appeared on AP News in June 2018.

The Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. marching arm-in-arm with other civil rights activists.

Cesar Chavez hoisting a picket sign in a farm workers’ strike. Gloria Steinem rallying

other feminists for equal rights.

During the 1960s and into the 1970s, amid the turbulence of protests for civil

rights and against the Vietnam War, every movement seemed to have a famous face —

someone at a podium or at the front of a march who possessed a charismatic style, soaring

oratory and an inspiring message.

Not so today.

The new wave of political activism, marked by protests in the nation’s capital and

cities across America, looks more anonymous.

Since the presidential election of Donald Trump, there have been marches for

women, science, the Dreamers — immigrants brought to the U.S. illegally as children —

and most recently, gun control, a response to the school shooting in Parkland, Florida. In

all those events, many voices — some more high-profile than others — have represented

each cause.

Have America’s protests changed so they rely more on the masses and less on one

captivating leader?

The answer, some experts say, is yes, for two reasons: Progressive politics have

moved in that direction— think Black Lives Matter, Occupy Wall Street — and social

media has radically transformed activism. Decades ago, it could take weeks of planning,

newspaper ads and a rousing speaker to organize a successful protest. Now a Facebook

post or a series of tweets can fill the streets, jam a state capitol or block an expressway.

“With the rise of social media, it’s definitely a lot easier for people to mobilize

more quickly and you don’t necessarily need to have one charismatic leader like Dr.

King, who had almost some kind of magical quality,” says Rachel Einwohner, a Purdue

University sociology professor. “But you still do need some powerful message that really

resonates with a lot of people.”

Technology alone hasn’t created the shift. Some progressives believe there’s

“something inherently wrong or problematic” about having a dynamic leader, says Fabio

Rojas, an Indiana University sociology professor. “Modern progressive social movements

see themselves as a very democratic form of politics,” he says. “When they make

decisions, they want a lot of consensus.”

Black Lives Matter, which has been in the forefront of protests against police

violence and fatal shootings of black men, is among the many movements that have

adopted this approach.

“The model of the charismatic leader was not something that we were interested

in and in fact, many of us were trained to believe that the people themselves are going to

set themselves free, not one person,” says Patrisse Cullors, a co-founder of the group.

Cullors says her group is sometimes misunderstood.

“People assume because we hit the streets and protested that we don’t believe in

anything else ... and that because we don’t have a single leader, we’re aimless.” Instead,

she says, Black Lives Matter, which has 40 chapters in the U.S., Canada and England, has

a clear strategy, including participating in electoral politics.

Another leaderless movement, Occupy Wall Street, rocked the heart of New

York’s financial district in 2011 with its encampment in a park and its rallying cry —

“We are the 99 Percent” — that condemned the concentration of wealth in the U.S.

Many credit Occupy with putting economic inequality on the national radar, but

Micah White, the group’s co-founder, says the real goal — to end the influence of money

on democracy — was “a constructive failure. ... The main lesson is that street protests do

not translate into political change because elected representatives are not required to

listen to the majority.”

While this democratic approach is effective, experts also say there are benefits to

having a leader.

“A lot of people out there today feel there’s something really wrong and broken

with the country, with the world,” says Karthik Ganapathy, rapid response director at

MoveOn.org, a public policy advocacy group. “The value of having a centralized leader

is there’s someone saying, ‘Here’s what you can do about it.’ Yet now, he says, there’s no

one who “can really claim that mantle the way that King did.”

But even in King’s day, movements couldn’t be reduced to a single face.

Whether it was the bus boycott in Montgomery, Alabama, the Vietnam War

protest at the Lincoln Memorial or the farm workers’ strike in California, each history-

making event depended on hundreds or thousands of foot soldiers who organized, raised

money and engaged in other grass-roots work.

And many leaders were backed by formidable organizations: For King, it was the

Southern Christian Leadership Conference; for anti-war activist Tom Hayden, the

Students for a Democratic Society; for feminist Betty Friedan, the National Organization

for Women.

Hasan Jeffries, an associate professor at Ohio State University and expert on

African-American history, says the civil rights movement was always decentralized, but

the media, looking for someone quotable, would zero in on one person — often, King.

These days, “activists are now able to push back, mainly through social media and

provide channels for multiple voices in ways that simply were unavailable on a large

scale 50 years earlier,” he says.

Einwohner, the Purdue sociologist, says when history books are written, they will

include groups such as Black Lives Matter and the Dreamers.

“I can’t think of a name or a face that necessarily is going to be remembered 50

years from now,” she says. “But will these movements be remembered? Absolutely.”

1. What purpose do you believe the author intends to achieve with this text?

2. What audience is the author addressing? How does she attempt to connect with that audience, and

how successful do you think she is in doing so?

3. What kind of tone does the author use? Do you think her tone supports her purpose and helps her

connect with the audience? Why or why not?

4. What typical features of news articles do you recognize in this text? What are your thoughts on how

effectively that genre helps the author achieve her purpose and connect with the audience?

5. What context appears to have prompted the author to write this text? In what context was the text

published?

2.3: Understand the rhetorical situation

We’ve asked you to think about rhetoric as a message that includes a purpose, an audience, an

appropriate tone and genre, and that occurs within a social context. In this section, we want to dig a

little deeper into what this context means for messages you want to convey.

Defining the rhetorical situation

All forms of communication take place in a context, a specific situation or combination of factors that

influences how we present a message and how our readers or listeners receive that message. This

context is called the rhetorical situation. It includes all the factors that affect how you present a message

and how an audience interprets your message, including the following:

● Audience needs, interests, and inclinations. Effective writers consider the audience’s frame of

mind to determine how readers are likely to respond to the message. When we write an

informative piece, for example, we need to be aware of how much our audience already knows

about our topic. Writing something that repeats what our reader already knows isn’t necessarily

interesting. In other cases, audiences may be predisposed to agree with us (as when we are

talking to a group of like-minded citizens working for the same political candidate). When an

audience is likely to disagree, however, you can strengthen your case by appealing to what you

know the audience values.

● Connections to larger conversations. If your message is connected to a larger issue being

discussed in your local community or our culture at large, readers will likely find it engaging.

Being mindful of those larger conversations will help you craft a more effective message.

● The writer’s credibility with the audience. Your credibility is based on your audience’s

perception of your experience, knowledge, and trustworthiness. In other words, who you are

and how you have treated your audience (or others) in the past definitely matters. In your daily

life, this credibility is part of your personal ethos. In your academic writing, it’s part of your

academic ethos.

● Writing style, tone, and visual appearance. Words that resonate with readers, a style that’s

appropriate for the occasion, a tone that invites rather than alienates readers, and a clear,

appealing visual presentation all work together to make your message more effective.

Understanding the impact of misreading the rhetorical situation

You may have heard of politicians or celebrities responding to a situation in a “tone-deaf” way. For

example, if a celebrity tweets a photo of herself in a bikini with the hashtag #cantbetooskinny! just after

a high-profile case of someone dying of anorexia, people who are concerned that she is ignoring the

emotional aftermath of the recent anorexia death may accuse her of being tone-deaf. Being “tone-deaf”

in this context means that a writer or speaker hasn’t fully considered the rhetorical situation and

appreciated the damage his or her comments may cause given the current context.

Similarly, communities sometimes deal with tone-deaf comments after a mass shooting. A few

years ago, using multiple guns and lots of ammunition, a man in his 20s attacked a Marine recruiting

center and a Navy Operations Center. Our local community college, which is right beside the Navy

Operations Center, went on lockdown for several hours. Five servicemen died in this ambush attack, and

many more were wounded, including first responders who rushed in to subdue the gunman. The

incident received national media attention, and the Vice President at the time, Joe Biden, came to town

to speak at a community memorial service for those who were killed. The shooting was a traumatic

experience for our community, to say the least.

A day after the gunman’s attack, a community member posted on social media a photo of his

vast gun collection with the caption “Aren’t these gorgeous?! Looking forward to firing these beauties

tomorrow!!!” His intention was to take his collection to a firing range the next day and celebrate his

birthday with some target practice.

After his Facebook post appeared, he was overwhelmed with people criticizing him for

celebrating his hobby without acknowledging the gun-related violence the day before and the shock and

sadness people in the community were feeling. People weren’t necessarily upset with him for having a

big gun collection or enjoying using his guns at a firing range. They were upset because his post seemed

horribly tone-deaf given what had just happened. In other words, he had failed to fully consider the

rhetorical situation.

REFLECT

Consider your past rhetorical situations Now that you’ve seen a rhetorical situation in action, think back to a time when one of your

communications was received really well or, frustratingly, didn’t go over well at all. Looking back, why do

you think it was received well or poorly by the audience? Even if you weren’t familiar with the rhetorical

terms purpose, audience, tone, genre, and context, how might you have been taking those into

consideration—or not—when writing your message. This communication could be anything from a

Facebook post, to a tweet, a text message to a friend or family member, or a school project.

Write a paragraph or more in which you reflect on a time when something you wrote effectively

accounted for—or didn’t—the rhetorical situation. Why do you think the audience responded the way

they did? In your response, use the terms purpose, audience, tone, genre, and context to explain what

happened.

UNDERSTAND

Examine the Rhetorical Situation in Two Scenarios

Let’s take a look at how the rhetorical situation works. Consider the following two scenarios in which

students write an email to their instructor about getting an extension for turning in a final project. As

you read each one, think about how well the writers keep the rhetorical situation in mind.

Scenario 1: Michael

Rhetorical Situation: Michael’s attendance in his first-year composition class this semester has been

spotty at best. When he does come to class, he talks loudly to the people sitting around him about

the great band he saw the night before. When class starts, however, he sometimes puts his head

down on his desk and sleeps through class. His writing is pretty good, but he’s turned in work after

the deadline a few times this semester. On the day the final portfolio is due, Michael writes the

following e-mail to his teacher:

Hi, I know portfolios were due 2day but ive been sick. I need more time to finish it. I will bring

it to your office when i’m thru.

Scenario 2: Alonzo

Rhetorical Situation: Alonzo is also in Michael’s class and has attended regularly this semester,

missing only one time for a school-sponsored event that he was required to attend. In class, he often

volunteers to read aloud and works actively in small groups. He has met with his instructor frequently

to discuss his revisions, and he has also visited the college’s writing center for extra help. The day the

final portfolios are due, Alonzo sends the following e-mail to his teacher:

Hi Prof. Sansing,

I saw the doctor this morning for a really bad sinus infection. I’m almost done with my

revisions, but I’m not sure I can finish them today because the medicine he gave me really

knocks me out. Could I possibly have another day or two to turn it in? I can email you the

doctor’s note if you want to see it.

Thank you.

Alonzo

In both scenarios, the students are asking for the same thing: more time to work on their final

portfolios. Which student do you think is more likely to get an extension? Most of us would say Alonzo,

but why? Sometimes we can sense when a writer is not effectively communicating a message for a

specific audience and purpose. We intuitively analyze the rhetorical situation to determine who is more

persuasive. Now let’s break down the components of each of these rhetorical situations to see how we

arrived at our response.

Thinking about audience needs, interests, and inclinations. Time is a major consideration of

Michael and Alonzo’s audience—their instructor. At the end of a semester or quarter, teachers often

have enormous amounts of student writing to evaluate, and they have to read and grade all of it in time

to meet school-imposed deadlines. Michael seems oblivious to any concerns or constraints his instructor

may be facing, such as a need to have grades turned in to the records office by a given date. By failing to

consider the needs of his audience, Michael further hurts his own case.

Alonzo’s request, which specifies exactly how much extra time he needs (one or two days),

allows the instructor to consider whether she can accommodate his request given her own constraints.

When we think about audience inclination, we’re considering what an audience is likely to do. We can’t

know whether this teacher is likely to give extensions to students, but we can surmise from the

information we already have that if she is so inclined to give extensions, she may be more prepared to

consider one for Alonzo rather than for Michael.

Making connections to larger conversations. Almost all college instructors address how they

deal with late work from the beginning of a course, usually in the syllabus. Michael and Alonzo could

benefit by considering their needs in the context of this larger conversation. Perhaps Professor Sansing

mentioned on day one that she allows every student one late submission. In that case, Alonzo could

appeal to that policy since he hasn’t submitted any assignments late. Perhaps during the semester,

Professor Sansing has given the class readings on the difficulty of adjusting to college. In that case,

Michael might appeal to Sansing’s demonstrated concern for students who have trouble adjusting to

college in their early semesters.

These two e-mail scenarios demonstrate how a message always exists within its rhetorical

situation, a network of factors that help determine its effectiveness. No matter how clear a message’s

purpose, the other factors that make up the rhetorical situation—including the tone and style of the

language, the author’s credibility, the audience’s relationship to the issue, and the visual appeal of the

message—work together to make or break it. The rhetorical situation is at work no matter how trivial or

important the message, and in both private and very public arenas, as you will see in later sections.

Thinking about the writer’s credibility with the audience. While the text is something that

exists in the present, determining an author’s (or speaker’s) credibility requires you also to look to the

past. What prior knowledge do you have of this writer? What has he or she done in the past to make

them a believable authority on the current issue? Do they seem trustworthy? How can you tell?

In the cases of Michael and Alonzo, the behaviors that they exhibited in the past now play into

the decision that the audience (the teacher) will make in response to their messages. Because Michael

routinely turns work in late and participates poorly in class, he doesn’t seem to be a serious student. On

the other hand, Alonzo’s strong record of class attendance and meeting deadlines suggests that he

would not ask for an extension without a good reason for doing so. Further, Alonzo has offered to supply

a doctor’s note to corroborate his story, a move that increases his credibility by using the “testimony” of

an expert.

Thinking about writing style, tone, and visual appearance. Notice that Michael doesn’t even ask

for an extension; he simply asserts that he will take one. Although Michael has demonstrated strong

writing skills in the past, his email is full of errors and spelling shortcuts. While e-mail is a more casual

medium than a formal essay, Michael should still observe conventions like including the professor’s

name in the greeting and ending his message with a closing and his own name. Ignoring these

conventions and submitting an e-mail with everything run together in three clipped sentences could

suggest to his teacher that he did not put much thought or time into his request, perhaps because he

didn’t think of it as a very important message. Michael's writing doesn't meet the expectations his

audience has for the purpose and style of this exchange.

In contrast, Alonzo presents his request respectfully. His language isn’t too formal for an e-mail,

but he does express himself in complete sentences without errors. He provides a complete explanation

and offers evidence from the doctor for support. His message looks like a standard letter, with a friendly

greeting and a “thank you” followed by his name at the end. His writing style definitely matches

audience expectations in the genre of email.

APPLY

Write while considering the rhetorical situation We’ve encouraged you to consider the following information when trying to determine a rhetorical

situation:

● Audience needs, interests, and inclinations

● Connections to larger conversations

● The writer’s credibility with the audience

● Writing style, tone, and visual appearance

Earlier in this section, you read e-mails from Michael and Alonzo asking for additional time to turn in

their final portfolios. To practice your understanding of rhetorical situations, write an e-mail to your

instructor asking for an extension on an imaginary assignment. (You will not actually send the email but

you will submit it for this assignment.) You should consider statements the instructor has in your syllabus

about late work, your own performance in the course to date, and any other context that might

influence your instructor’s response.

After you’ve written your email, write a paragraph or more explaining how you interpreted the

rhetorical situation to compose your e-mail. For example, how did thinking about audience needs and

inclinations, broader context, your credibility, and considerations of style, tone, and visual appearance

help shape your writing?

Chapter 2 Project

Write an essay evaluating how well a text responds to a rhetorical situation

In this chapter, we introduced you to the term rhetoric and encouraged you to set aside any pre-

conceived ideas about it as being limited to overheated nonsense thrown around by political opponents.

Instead, we want you to think of rhetoric as the power to effectively communicate a message.

We also asked you to think about rhetoric as having five key components: purpose, audience,

genre, tone, and context. Writers use these elements together to create texts that connect with their

audiences in meaningful ways. In the Section 2.2 Apply activity, you spent some time answering

questions about how Sharon Cohen may have considered these five components to write her article

“Today’s Protests Rely on the Masses.”

Then, we introduced you to the concept of the rhetorical situation, a broader understanding of a

text’s context that includes the following:

● Audience needs, interests, and inclinations.

● Connections to larger conversations.

● The writer’s credibility with the audience.

● Writing style, tone, and visual appearance.

For the Chapter 2 Project, start with your notes on Sharon Cohen’s article “Today’s Protests Rely on

the Masses” and expand them by further considering the rhetorical situation of the article. To

understand the Associated Press audience, do a little web research to learn more about the organization

and the kinds of content it publishes. Who would be interested in reading it? Other light research could

help place the 2018 article in a broader context and help you discover more about the author’s

background and credibility.

When you have gathered more information, write an essay in which you evaluate how well you

believe the article responds to its rhetorical situation. Your essay should address how well the writer

appears to have achieved her purpose, reached her audience, used a genre that appealed to the

audience, struck an appropriate tone, and considered the larger context.

2.1: Understand what rhetoric really is

Examining the inspirational power of rhetoric

2.2: Understand Five Key Components of Rhetoric

2.3: Understand the rhetorical situation
Defining the rhetorical situation
Understanding the impact of misreading the rhetorical situation
Chapter 2 Project