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Rhetorical situations
- 1. 1 of 3 Chapter 1: Purpose The Norton Field Guide to Writing, 3e, © 2013, W. W. Norton & Company Part 1: Rhetorical Situations Purpose, Audience, Genre, Stance, and Media/Design
- 2. 2 of 3 Chapter 1: PurposePart 1: Rhetorical Situations All Writing Has a Purpose • Reasons we write • To explore thoughts and emotions • To express ourselves • To record words and events • To persuade an audience • Identify your purpose
- 3. 3 of 3 Chapter 1: PurposePart 1: Rhetorical Situations All Writing Has a Purpose • Think about your purpose • What do you want your audience to do, think, or feel? • What does this writing task call on you to do? • What is the best way to achieve your purpose?
- 4. 4 of 3 Chapter 1: PurposePart 1: Rhetorical Situations Audience • The audience influences and drives everything you write • Your audience must interpret what you write according to their expectations and experiences, not yours • In academic writing, the audience will be professors
- 5. 5 of 3 Chapter 1: PurposePart 1: Rhetorical Situations Audience • Identify your audience • Known: people with whom you are familiar or have expectations known to you • You can be your own audience (notes, etc.) • Multiple: may have several levels of readers such as supervisors who pass your messages on to their bosses • Unknown: can be the most difficult to address because you don’t know the audience’s expectations or experiences
- 6. 6 of 3 Chapter 1: PurposePart 1: Rhetorical Situations Thinking About Audience Audience Whom do you want to reach? What is your audience’s background? What are their interests? Is there any demographic information you should know? What political circumstances affect their reading?
- 7. 7 of 3 Chapter 1: PurposePart 1: Rhetorical Situations Thinking About Audience Audience What does your audience already know? What is your relationship with your audience? What does your audience need and expect from you? What kind of response do you want? How can you best appeal to your audience?
- 8. 8 of 3 Chapter 1: PurposePart 1: Rhetorical Situations Genre • Genre: the kind of writing such as letters, profiles, reports, position papers, poems, blog posts, instructions, and so forth • Genres help us write by establishing features for conveying certain content
- 9. 9 of 3 Chapter 1: PurposePart 1: Rhetorical Situations Genre • Think about your genre • What is your genre, and how does it affect what content you include? • Does it call for a specific strategy? • Does it require certain organization? • Does it affect your tone? • Does it require formal or informal language? • Do you have a choice of medium? • Does it have any design requirements?
- 10. 10 of 3 Chapter 1: PurposePart 1: Rhetorical Situations Stance • Stance is your attitude toward your topic • Identify your stance • Objective, critical, curious, opinionated, passionate, indifferent • Stance is affected by genre • Stance is communicated through tone
- 11. 11 of 3 Chapter 1: PurposePart 1: Rhetorical Situations Thinking about Stance Stance What is your stance, and how does it relate to your purpose? How should stance be reflected in your tone? How is stance likely to be received by your audience? Should you openly reveal your stance?
- 12. 12 of 3 Chapter 1: PurposePart 1: Rhetorical Situations Media • Medium is a go-between, or a way for information to be conveyed from one person to another • “Media” is the plural form of “medium” • We communicate through many media • Sometimes a phone call is appropriate, sometimes an email is sufficient, sometimes a formal letter is necessary • Each medium has unique characteristics that influence what and how we communicate • Multimedia is combined media • Multimodal is combined multimedia formats
- 13. 13 of 3 Chapter 1: PurposePart 1: Rhetorical Situations Think about Media Media How does medium affect what elements you include? What medium are you using (print, spoken, etc.)? How does medium affect strategies and organization? How does medium affect your language?
- 14. 14 of 3 Chapter 1: PurposePart 1: Rhetorical Situations Design • Think about design • What is the appropriate look for your rhetorical situation? • What elements need to be designed? • What font(s) are appropriate to your audience, purpose, genre, and medium? • Are you including any visuals? • Should you include headings?
Editor's Notes
- Mention to students that identifying purpose is critical to clear communication. Purposes include entertainment, persuasion, demonstration, or gaining knowledge.
- The audience does not need to know everything you know, only what you want them to know at any given moment.
- Give students this scenario: make believe you are the human resources director for a large corporation. Your task is to distribute a formal letter to all employees informing them that their health-care benefits have been substantially reduced. Remind students that they are writing to people who may have an eighth-grade education or a masters’ degree, so they must be conscious of complexity of wording and technical jargon. The audience is likely not going to be happy about this news, so the letter must be worded to soften the blow as much as possible. Have students get into groups and think of potential problems that might arise when writing such a letter.
- Ask students to come up with different scenarios and then decide which genre would be best suited for each scenario. Then ask students how tone and stance would be affected by the genres chosen.
- Explain to students that stance is sometimes called argumentation. Argumentation does not mean that a writer and a reader will go to fisticuffs; it means the writer must prove what he/she is saying. This is important in academic writing because students need to add credibility to their writing by citing experts in their fields.
- All these aspects are important, but audience is probably the most important because without it, writing is in vain.
- Give students an assignment in which they take a block of information and then decide which medium or combination of media would be best to communicate the information.
- For the assignment in the previous slide, have students design their message, and then justify why they designed it that way.