Understanding the Rhetorical Situation

Hello. This video goes through the concept of the rhetorical situation as it is presented in Everyone's an Author, Chapter 2, Everyone's an Author by Andrea Lunsford and others. For those who are not in my class who may be stumbling upon this video for other reasons, I should note that this video does not cover the rhetorical situation. the important essay by the rhetoric scholar Lloyd Bitzer from the 1960s. I may do another video about that, since Bitzer's concept of the rhetorical situation is, in a sense, though simpler, I think actually better in the long run, and certainly more interesting and productive for rhetorical scholarship. But anyway, since I'm doing this video for teaching purposes, I'm going to walk through the parts of the rhetorical situation as defined by Lunsford and colleagues, and those parts are genre, audience, purpose, stance, context, and medium or design. You should think of this video as a set of guided questions or a heuristic for asking yourself as you develop a paper. So the first part of the rhetorical situation is the genre. Genres are types or categories of things. The way a genus covers a number of species, a genre is a type of writing. So in a typical freshman English class, a narrative or a proposal or an opinion piece, all of these would be examples of genres. So when you start a paper for a class or anything else, you want to ask yourself, what's the genre, what's the type that I'm writing in? Then as you move on from that, you want to ask yourself, does my genre require any kinds of organization? A memo typically requires a heading in business and professional writing and certain other kinds of organizational ticks. A narrative in either a freshman essay or in other kinds of essays typically involves an organization that is chronological, at least in large part, although a person may depart from that in the way they write a piece involving flashbacks or forwarding, yeah, sort of foreshadowing or anticipating things that are to come. What kind of tone is characteristic of this genre or is expected? People typically expect storytelling to have a different tone than, for example, a memo. If you wrote a business memo in the manner of a fairy tale or a fable, it would seem to be totally wrong. Tone, let me say, and I'll get back to this at another point in this presentation, involves the attitude of a writer toward the subject audience, etc. And so tone can be a very tricky subject. Are there any design features that are characteristic of a genre? The first books you ever read probably had pictures in them, but many books that you might read now probably don't. have pictures in them. So the next part of the rhetorical situation is the audience. And although you are writing, if you're writing in a classroom situation, you might think that your audience is the teacher. It might be a lot of other things as well. So the first question you ask yourself in terms of an audience is, who is my audience? Who am I writing for? I think one of the first things you want to ask yourself is, am I writing writing for one person or many? And am I writing for a real person or an imagined person? If I say write something for people, other people in college, I'm asking you to imagine that audience, but you know as a student that in some sense I'm your real audience because I'm the one doing the grading. So this can be a little trickier than it looks at first blush. How are you like or unlike your audience? Let's take my students writing to me. They are like me in the sense that they are writers in English, a language that both of us know. They are associated with Coastal Carolina University and so am I. On the one hand they are unlike Me, in that we have different roles. I'm the teacher and they're the students. I presumably have more education generally than they do, although they might have some knowledge that I don't have. Certainly they do. Next, what is your relationship with the audience? Do you have a good relationship? Do you have a non-existent relationship? Is a relationship going to be new and completely established by virtue of this paper? Or do you have a hostile relationship? Think about the difference between writing a note to your mother or father and writing a letter complaining about a grade to a professor. Obviously, the relationship will be different in each of those, although it'll be even more complicated if you're also writing your mother or your father about your grade. What is your audience's interest? What is their take on you, on the subject, on reading the assignments? Are they positively disposed? Are they indifferent? Are they hostile? Do they know anything about the subject? Or do they have any particular interest in the subject? Presumably, if I assign a topic, I have an interest in hearing what you have to write about it. Do they know anything about the subject? Okay, I mentioned this before in terms of interest, but really the knowledge about the subject is quite important. You should not always assume that your teacher knows more about a subject than you do. Indeed, it could be the case that you know much more about a subject than the teacher. In cases where you're writing a narrative about yourself, for example, you will be the expert and your teacher will be, relatively speaking, a complete novice. On the other hand, if you're writing a narrative about a public event or an event that is in the public consciousness, then it may be that your teacher knows something about it. If you're writing about history, it may be, let's say you're writing about a historical event for a history professor, the teacher probably has a lot more knowledge about that event than you do, and so that may certainly be something to take into consideration when you are writing and revising. Another part of the rhetorical situation is your purpose. What is your purpose in writing? Now, you might say, well, my purpose is to get a good grade, probably an A, an ideal world. But if that's the only way you think of your purpose, then everything you write will be so cynically directed that it will be hard to achieve even that purpose. You might want to ask yourself, what is my internal motivation for... writing about this. If you're writing a narrative, it should be something that's important to you. It should be something that matters to you. And if you ask the question, how does this matter to me? What is my internal motivation for writing about this? And you answer, nothing. I don't have any internal motivation for this beyond the grade. Well, then you should ask yourself, what could be? If I could give myself some motivation, what could that be? There's a real fake-it-till-you-make-it quality to motivation. If you are entirely cynical and just interested in a grade while you're writing, it's going to be something that leaves a trace in your writing. Teachers can tell whether students care about their topics that they're writing about or not. And what is your goal in writing? So this is a little bit different from your purpose. You might be motivated by something. Something might be compelling you. But then you might also have a goal such as changing my mind about something, if I'm the audience. Changing the audience's mind about something or getting an audience to act. If you are writing a flyer for a student club, you want people to join the club. That's your goal. If you're writing about a personal story for your English teacher, then... In some sense, you have a goal of getting a good grade, but you probably have a goal of, how do you do that? Well, you might have a goal of making the teacher interested in your subject, or a goal of having the teacher respect your approach to the subject, something like that. So, you can think of lots of things that you can achieve beyond simply getting a grade, or things that can motivate you. beyond simply getting the grade. The next topic is your stance. And I'm going to divide this up into four areas as following the book. Stance towards several things. First is your stance toward the topic. What is your attitude? about the topic. Is it something you care about? Is it something you're indifferent to? Is it something that scares you? Is it something that excites you? Is it something that really lights a fire for you? Or is it something that you're doing just because you were told to write about this? What is your stance toward your audience? You might think, I don't have a stance toward my audience. I don't care what Kellogg thinks. But you try to develop a stance toward your audience in... your writing. So what could be your stance toward me or anybody else in your potential audience? You might think let's have a stance of respect for the audience's time or a stance of mutually beneficial reading experience, you know, you're trying to, you know, cultivate goodwill on my part or on the part of an audience. You want maybe a stance that doesn't bore me or cause me to lose interest or turn hostile. But in any piece of writing, you have some sort of stance toward your audience. I mentioned earlier a letter of complaint. If you write a letter of complaint and you're really angry at the audience, then your complaint might not be that successful. On the other hand, if you take a stance toward an audience that you're complaining about, like a grade, and you have a stance that is respectful, like, I know you're a professional, I understand this, but I still think this is unfair and here is why, you might have a better result than simply unleashing your fury on your audience. So, stances mediated by tone. Again, tone is all of the language that you use to convey your attitude. I would say that in school writing, you really want to try to establish a professional tone. It is not necessarily the same tone that you use with your friends or your boyfriend or girlfriend or your parents. You want to strike a tone and language that has a way of cultivating respect, goodwill, understanding, patience, that sort of thing. Um, finally, in terms of stance, how will your stance toward all these things be received by your audience? Are they going to be drawn in by it? Are they going to be wowed by your stance, or are they going to be underwhelmed? If you're writing about something that is very personal to you, it is not necessarily the case if you're like really wrapped up in that. It is not necessarily the case that your audience is also going to be wrapped up in that unless you make them wrapped up in it. You have to think about, how can I get that effect? The larger context of your paper includes a lot of things. So, what else has been said about the topic? From all the conversations that I've had about the paper we're working on now, there's probably something that has been said by somebody else in a published form about most of your topics. Even personal things like the loss of a relative or the move, transition to college, although people may not have written about how you experienced your relative's loss or how you went to college, people have written about the loss of relatives and about the transition to college. There are probably sources that you can consult. What else has been said about the subject? What kinds of constraints are there in terms of the context? I can tell you some constraints right off about this paper. The constraint is it's supposed to be a certain length, a certain word count. It is also supposed to be written in a manner that's appropriate for a college-level class. It is also supposed to be double-spaced. It is also supposed to be in MLA format, etc. I mean, all of these things are... among the constraints. It's supposed to be turned in the draft on a certain date. It is supposed to be uploaded in a certain classroom management system and so forth. How much independence do you have in the context? I try to not hem my students in in terms of what they're writing about, but there you can't just go ahead and write about anything for any paper. On the other hand, there are probably choices you make, and you might want to consider what those are. So the final thing we're going to deal with in terms of the rhetorical situation is the medium, that is, the final form in which it takes place, and the design. Do you have any choice in terms of medium or design? Well, sometimes you do, and sometimes you don't. If your professor says, as I've said this semester, You upload all of your formal assignments via Canvas electronically, then that's it. You don't have a choice about that. You can't send me an email saying, I want to do it this way, or here's a paper copy, or, you know, no, that's... The medium is chosen for you in that way. But on the other hand, you have some choices in terms of maybe other assignments. There have been assignments when I've said you can turn it in online or... on paper. What are the restrictions? What are the restrictions that guide your choice of medium? I didn't say you couldn't use a goofy font, although I think we should assume that as an implied restriction. It probably won't go over well if you use some crazy Harry Potter font or something like that. I use a normal font, but my restrictions here typically involve document length and formatting and that sort of thing. And all of that is part of the medium in which it is put. And also I said upload these electronically, but that does not mean you can choose any output. Here's a restriction. I'm not allowing people to upload in the Apple Pages format, because I am not an Apple user, except for my iPad, and managing to read those on Canvas has been a problem in the past. So you have to turn it in, you know, the papers in my classes, typically in either Microsoft Word or PDF form, and since you can easily save Apple Pages documents to PDF, that's how I want them. So that's a restriction. What about the conventions of writing? By this, I think we mean things like, do you want full sentences? Do you want standard English grammar? Do you want a title? Yes, you want a title. Do you want your name and your And the date on the paper, yes, because you want the MLA conventions. All of that are among the conventions. What's the look that you want to achieve? My feeling is that you want this as all papers, all the formal papers in my classes, even though we're uploading them electronically, you want them to look like, when they're printed, they look like a standard college paper. So this is why. The example papers in the Coastal Writers'Reference have that. that look, that double-spaced look, the bracket right margin, the flush left margin, the indented paragraphs, the page numbers, and so forth. So you want it to have all of the bells and whistles of a professional look that says, hey, I'm taking this seriously. And do you want to include any references? I've already asked you to ask what else have other people said, and so, yeah, you can include references, and I would encourage you to include references most of the time, unless a professor says you shouldn't include references, which I don't like as a practice because I think it invites plagiarism, but that's a conversation for another time. So, that is the rhetorical situation as explained in Everyone's an Author by Andrea Lunsford and others. Chapter 2. I've taken a few things out of their discussion for purposes of eliminating redundancy, but that's... those are the questions that you want to ask yourself as you elaborate on the rhetorical situation. Thanks.

the important essay by the rhetoric scholar Lloyd Bitzer from the 1960s. I may do another video about that, since Bitzer's concept of the rhetorical situation is, in a sense, though simpler, I think actually better in the long run, and certainly more interesting and productive for rhetorical scholarship. But anyway, since I'm doing this video for teaching purposes, I'm going to walk through the parts of the rhetorical situation as defined by Lunsford and colleagues, and those parts are genre, audience, purpose, stance, context, and medium or design.

You should think of this video as a set of guided questions or a heuristic for asking yourself as you develop a paper. So the first part of the rhetorical situation is the genre. Genres are types or categories of things. The way a genus covers a number of species, a genre is a type of writing.

So in a typical freshman English class, a narrative or a proposal or an opinion piece, all of these would be examples of genres. So when you start a paper for a class or anything else, you want to ask yourself, what's the genre, what's the type that I'm writing in? Then as you move on from that, you want to ask yourself, does my genre require any kinds of organization?

A memo typically requires a heading in business and professional writing and certain other kinds of organizational ticks. A narrative in either a freshman essay or in other kinds of essays typically involves an organization that is chronological, at least in large part, although a person may depart from that in the way they write a piece involving flashbacks or forwarding, yeah, sort of foreshadowing or anticipating things that are to come. What kind of tone is characteristic of this genre or is expected? People typically expect storytelling to have a different tone than, for example, a memo.

If you wrote a business memo in the manner of a fairy tale or a fable, it would seem to be totally wrong. Tone, let me say, and I'll get back to this at another point in this presentation, involves the attitude of a writer toward the subject audience, etc. And so tone can be a very tricky subject.

Are there any design features that are characteristic of a genre? The first books you ever read probably had pictures in them, but many books that you might read now probably don't. have pictures in them. So the next part of the rhetorical situation is the audience.

And although you are writing, if you're writing in a classroom situation, you might think that your audience is the teacher. It might be a lot of other things as well. So the first question you ask yourself in terms of an audience is, who is my audience? Who am I writing for?

I think one of the first things you want to ask yourself is, am I writing writing for one person or many? And am I writing for a real person or an imagined person? If I say write something for people, other people in college, I'm asking you to imagine that audience, but you know as a student that in some sense I'm your real audience because I'm the one doing the grading.

So this can be a little trickier than it looks at first blush. How are you like or unlike your audience? Let's take my students writing to me. They are like me in the sense that they are writers in English, a language that both of us know. They are associated with Coastal Carolina University and so am I.

On the one hand they are unlike Me, in that we have different roles. I'm the teacher and they're the students. I presumably have more education generally than they do, although they might have some knowledge that I don't have. Certainly they do.

Next, what is your relationship with the audience? Do you have a good relationship? Do you have a non-existent relationship?

Is a relationship going to be new and completely established by virtue of this paper? Or do you have a hostile relationship? Think about the difference between writing a note to your mother or father and writing a letter complaining about a grade to a professor.

Obviously, the relationship will be different in each of those, although it'll be even more complicated if you're also writing your mother or your father about your grade. What is your audience's interest? What is their take on you, on the subject, on reading the assignments? Are they positively disposed? Are they indifferent?

Are they hostile? Do they know anything about the subject? Or do they have any particular interest in the subject?

Presumably, if I assign a topic, I have an interest in hearing what you have to write about it. Do they know anything about the subject? Okay, I mentioned this before in terms of interest, but really the knowledge about the subject is quite important.

You should not always assume that your teacher knows more about a subject than you do. Indeed, it could be the case that you know much more about a subject than the teacher. In cases where you're writing a narrative about yourself, for example, you will be the expert and your teacher will be, relatively speaking, a complete novice.

On the other hand, if you're writing a narrative about a public event or an event that is in the public consciousness, then it may be that your teacher knows something about it. If you're writing about history, it may be, let's say you're writing about a historical event for a history professor, the teacher probably has a lot more knowledge about that event than you do, and so that may certainly be something to take into consideration when you are writing and revising. Another part of the rhetorical situation is your purpose.

What is your purpose in writing? Now, you might say, well, my purpose is to get a good grade, probably an A, an ideal world. But if that's the only way you think of your purpose, then everything you write will be so cynically directed that it will be hard to achieve even that purpose. You might want to ask yourself, what is my internal motivation for...

writing about this. If you're writing a narrative, it should be something that's important to you. It should be something that matters to you.

And if you ask the question, how does this matter to me? What is my internal motivation for writing about this? And you answer, nothing.

I don't have any internal motivation for this beyond the grade. Well, then you should ask yourself, what could be? If I could give myself some motivation, what could that be?

There's a real fake-it-till-you-make-it quality to motivation. If you are entirely cynical and just interested in a grade while you're writing, it's going to be something that leaves a trace in your writing. Teachers can tell whether students care about their topics that they're writing about or not.

And what is your goal in writing? So this is a little bit different from your purpose. You might be motivated by something.

Something might be compelling you. But then you might also have a goal such as changing my mind about something, if I'm the audience. Changing the audience's mind about something or getting an audience to act. If you are writing a flyer for a student club, you want people to join the club.

That's your goal. If you're writing about a personal story for your English teacher, then... In some sense, you have a goal of getting a good grade, but you probably have a goal of, how do you do that?

Well, you might have a goal of making the teacher interested in your subject, or a goal of having the teacher respect your approach to the subject, something like that. So, you can think of lots of things that you can achieve beyond simply getting a grade, or things that can motivate you. beyond simply getting the grade. The next topic is your stance.

And I'm going to divide this up into four areas as following the book. Stance towards several things. First is your stance toward the topic. What is your attitude? about the topic.

Is it something you care about? Is it something you're indifferent to? Is it something that scares you? Is it something that excites you? Is it something that really lights a fire for you?

Or is it something that you're doing just because you were told to write about this? What is your stance toward your audience? You might think, I don't have a stance toward my audience. I don't care what Kellogg thinks. But you try to develop a stance toward your audience in...

your writing. So what could be your stance toward me or anybody else in your potential audience? You might think let's have a stance of respect for the audience's time or a stance of mutually beneficial reading experience, you know, you're trying to, you know, cultivate goodwill on my part or on the part of an audience. You want maybe a stance that doesn't bore me or cause me to lose interest or turn hostile. But in any piece of writing, you have some sort of stance toward your audience.

I mentioned earlier a letter of complaint. If you write a letter of complaint and you're really angry at the audience, then your complaint might not be that successful. On the other hand, if you take a stance toward an audience that you're complaining about, like a grade, and you have a stance that is respectful, like, I know you're a professional, I understand this, but I still think this is unfair and here is why, you might have a better result than simply unleashing your fury on your audience. So, stances mediated by tone. Again, tone is all of the language that you use to convey your attitude.

I would say that in school writing, you really want to try to establish a professional tone. It is not necessarily the same tone that you use with your friends or your boyfriend or girlfriend or your parents. You want to strike a tone and language that has a way of cultivating respect, goodwill, understanding, patience, that sort of thing.

Um, finally, in terms of stance, how will your stance toward all these things be received by your audience? Are they going to be drawn in by it? Are they going to be wowed by your stance, or are they going to be underwhelmed?

If you're writing about something that is very personal to you, it is not necessarily the case if you're like really wrapped up in that. It is not necessarily the case that your audience is also going to be wrapped up in that unless you make them wrapped up in it. You have to think about, how can I get that effect?

The larger context of your paper includes a lot of things. So, what else has been said about the topic? From all the conversations that I've had about the paper we're working on now, there's probably something that has been said by somebody else in a published form about most of your topics.

Even personal things like the loss of a relative or the move, transition to college, although people may not have written about how you experienced your relative's loss or how you went to college, people have written about the loss of relatives and about the transition to college. There are probably sources that you can consult. What else has been said about the subject? What kinds of constraints are there in terms of the context?

I can tell you some constraints right off about this paper. The constraint is it's supposed to be a certain length, a certain word count. It is also supposed to be written in a manner that's appropriate for a college-level class.

It is also supposed to be double-spaced. It is also supposed to be in MLA format, etc. I mean, all of these things are...

among the constraints. It's supposed to be turned in the draft on a certain date. It is supposed to be uploaded in a certain classroom management system and so forth. How much independence do you have in the context? I try to not hem my students in in terms of what they're writing about, but there you can't just go ahead and write about anything for any paper.

On the other hand, there are probably choices you make, and you might want to consider what those are. So the final thing we're going to deal with in terms of the rhetorical situation is the medium, that is, the final form in which it takes place, and the design. Do you have any choice in terms of medium or design? Well, sometimes you do, and sometimes you don't. If your professor says, as I've said this semester, You upload all of your formal assignments via Canvas electronically, then that's it.

You don't have a choice about that. You can't send me an email saying, I want to do it this way, or here's a paper copy, or, you know, no, that's... The medium is chosen for you in that way. But on the other hand, you have some choices in terms of maybe other assignments. There have been assignments when I've said you can turn it in online or...

on paper. What are the restrictions? What are the restrictions that guide your choice of medium? I didn't say you couldn't use a goofy font, although I think we should assume that as an implied restriction. It probably won't go over well if you use some crazy Harry Potter font or something like that.

I use a normal font, but my restrictions here typically involve document length and formatting and that sort of thing. And all of that is part of the medium in which it is put. And also I said upload these electronically, but that does not mean you can choose any output.

Here's a restriction. I'm not allowing people to upload in the Apple Pages format, because I am not an Apple user, except for my iPad, and managing to read those on Canvas has been a problem in the past. So you have to turn it in, you know, the papers in my classes, typically in either Microsoft Word or PDF form, and since you can easily save Apple Pages documents to PDF, that's how I want them. So that's a restriction.

What about the conventions of writing? By this, I think we mean things like, do you want full sentences? Do you want standard English grammar? Do you want a title?

Yes, you want a title. Do you want your name and your And the date on the paper, yes, because you want the MLA conventions. All of that are among the conventions.

What's the look that you want to achieve? My feeling is that you want this as all papers, all the formal papers in my classes, even though we're uploading them electronically, you want them to look like, when they're printed, they look like a standard college paper. So this is why.

The example papers in the Coastal Writers'Reference have that. that look, that double-spaced look, the bracket right margin, the flush left margin, the indented paragraphs, the page numbers, and so forth. So you want it to have all of the bells and whistles of a professional look that says, hey, I'm taking this seriously.

And do you want to include any references? I've already asked you to ask what else have other people said, and so, yeah, you can include references, and I would encourage you to include references most of the time, unless a professor says you shouldn't include references, which I don't like as a practice because I think it invites plagiarism, but that's a conversation for another time. So, that is the rhetorical situation as explained in Everyone's an Author by Andrea Lunsford and others.

Chapter 2. I've taken a few things out of their discussion for purposes of eliminating redundancy, but that's... those are the questions that you want to ask yourself as you elaborate on the rhetorical situation. Thanks.

Transcript for:Understanding the Rhetorical Situation

Transcript for:
Understanding the Rhetorical Situation