A week of ENG 101.

Same news, three different messages

ENG 101 · The rhetorical situation · about 650 words

Imagine you have to tell three people that you failed a chemistry test. You might text your best friend, mention it to a parent at dinner, and email your teacher to ask about a retake. The facts stay the same. Almost everything else changes: the words, the length, the tone, even what you choose to mention. You already adjust your writing all the time. A composition course asks you to do it on purpose.

Writing teachers call the set of conditions around any piece of writing the rhetorical situation. The idea goes back to ancient Greece, where Aristotle studied how speakers persuade different audiences. In 1968 the rhetoric scholar Lloyd Bitzer argued that speech and writing are usually responses to a situation, some problem or need that calls for words. Most writing courses today break the situation into four parts: audience, purpose, context and genre.

Audience is who will read the writing. The key questions are what readers already know, what they care about, and what they expect from you. Your friend knows the class and needs no background. Your teacher knows the test better than you do but not why you struggled. A writer who forgets the audience either explains too little, leaving readers lost, or too much, which can feel condescending.

Purpose is what the writing is trying to do. Writers inform, persuade, request, entertain, apologize, or some mix of these. The email to your teacher has a clear purpose: to get a chance at a retake. Every sentence should help with that. A long complaint about how unfair the test felt might be honest, but it probably works against your purpose.

Context is the when, where and why-now of the writing. It includes timing, the medium, and what has already been said. An email sent the night of the test reads differently from one sent two weeks later. A post on a class discussion board sits inside a conversation that started before you arrived, so it should respond to that conversation instead of starting from zero.

Genre is the type of writing, with its familiar patterns: a lab report, a text message, a cover letter, a product review. Genres are more than formats. The rhetoric scholar Carolyn Miller argued in 1984 that genres are typical ways of getting things done in situations that keep coming up. A lab report has a methods section because scientists need to repeat each other's work. When you know why a genre looks the way it does, you can use it well instead of just copying its shape.

The four parts affect each other, so changing one shifts the others. Suppose you are writing about a new phone policy at school. For the school newspaper, with classmates as your audience and the purpose of explaining the rule, you would write a short news article. For a letter to the principal asking for a change, you would write something more formal, with reasons and a specific request. Same topic, very different writing.

Here is a quick routine to use before starting any assignment:

Name the reader. Picture one real person who will read it, and write down what they already know.

Name the job. Finish this sentence: after reading this, I want my reader to know, believe or do something specific.

Check the setting and the form. Ask where the writing will appear and what that kind of writing usually looks like. Find an example if you can.

Many students think good writing means one fixed set of rules, such as never using "I" or always writing five paragraphs. Those rules fit some situations and not others. Strong writers are not the ones who memorize a single style. They are the ones who read the situation first and then make choices that fit it. In a college course, every assignment is its own rhetorical situation, and the assignment sheet is where you start reading it.

Sources: Aristotle, Rhetoric (4th century BCE); L. F. Bitzer, "The Rhetorical Situation," Philosophy and Rhetoric (1968); C. R. Miller, "Genre as Social Action," Quarterly Journal of Speech (1984).