Unit 1

Part 1: Rhetorical Situation

Essential Question: What are the components of the rhetorical situation?

1.1 Elements of the Rhetorical Situation

Rhetorical situation: the set of circumstances, events, and contexts that shape any communication.

  • The rhetorical situation of a text refers to the exigence, purpose, audience, writer, context, and message.

  • Writers make key decisions about what to say and how to say it based on their specific situation.

  • Exigence: the problem the essay or speech addresses; the impetus

  • Purpose: the goals the writer or speaker wants to achieve

  • Audience: receivers of the message who often have a variety of values and beliefs

  • Writer or speaker: a unique voice with values and beliefs

  • Context: the time, place, and occasion

  • Message: the substance of the writer’s or speaker’s main points

1.2 Exigence

  • The spark that ignites the need for the writer to write (or the speaker to speak) is the exigence, the problem or situation that propels the act of creating a text.

  • Anything can be an exigence if it makes a person feel the need to respond to it in writing or formal speech.

1.3 Purpose

  • The purpose is what the writer wants to happen as a result of the writing.

  • The method a writer chooses depends in part on that writer’s purpose.

  • Purpose is intentional. Sometimes readers can find purpose explicitly in the text (they can point to where the writer makes it clear) and other times the writer only implies a purpose that is suggested at various points int he text.

  • The writer wants something to happen in response to the exigence and decides to enter the conversation on a subject in order to make that happen.

1.4 Audience

  • Audience is the people who will be reading or hearing the message.

  • Exigence and purpose for writing an argument are intertwined with the intended audience. To get a message across, you need to understand and assess the target of your message.

    • Look at values

    • Consider beliefs, history or background, and their needs and desires

1.5 Context and Message

  • Message - the idea that a writer wants to convey

  • Context - time, place, and occasion

Part 2: Claims and Evidence

Essential Question: As a reader, how can you identify a writer’s position and the way that position is supported? As a writer, how can you develop and support your own position?

2.1 Claims

  • Writers convey positions through one or more claims that requires a defense. Because these claims are not necessarily factual but instead are asserted to be true, they need to be backed up with evidence.

  • Position: writers gather and arrange their ideas about an issue and determine how their views relate to others’ positions on the same issue

  • Claims: statements asserted to be true that are not obviously facts.

  • Because a claim is not true by itself, it must be defended.

2.2 Evidence and Reasoning

  • Writers defend their claims with evidence and/or reasoning. Without that, claims would just be opinions with no grounding in facts or logic.

  • Evidence: information to prove an idea is valid.

  • First, spend time thinking about a topic and the information related to it. Then, use that information to develop a position and claim. After you develop a claim, the information that originally introduced you to the subject becomes evidence for supporting the claim.

  • Defending a claim requires reasoning. Reasoning both leads to and extends from the claim.

  • Reasoning: showing your audience how you think through your argument and how the evidence supports the claim.

  • Process of gathering information, formulating a claim, providing evidence to support the claim, and using reasoning to explain how the evidence relates to the claim is a cycle.

2.3 Types of Evidence

  • Writers support their arguments with different types of evidence.

  • Facts: objective information

    • Pros: facts are hard to disagree with

    • Cons: readers may not agree with what constitutes a proven fact

  • Anecdotes: short, real-life stories used to illustrate a point

    • Pros: anecdotes show how a claim might matter in the real world

    • Cons: readers may not agree on what the anecdote proves

  • Analogies: comparisons between two things used to explain or clarify a point

    • Pros: analogies make something unfamiliar or complex more understandable

    • Cons: readers may not understand the things being compared causing them to reject the argument

  • Statistics: numerical facts or data

    • Pros: statistics are easy to accept because they show trends to support claims

    • Cons: readers may not trust the source or may believe that the statistics have been unfairly manipulated

  • Examples: specific instances that demonstrate something relevant to the claim.

    • Pros: examples make abstract concepts understandable and relatable

    • Cons: readers may believe the examples are not relevant

  • Details: relevant facts, descriptions, items, or features

    • Pros: details provide visual images, making the claim real and substantial

    • Cons: readers may not relate to writer’s chosen details

  • Illustrations: examples meant to clarify or prove something

    • Pros: illustrations make the claim feel more realistic, similar to the effects of using examples and details

    • Cons: readers may not accept them or the claim if the illustrations are unfamiliar

  • Expert opinions: statements made by people with special knowledge of the topic

    • Pros: expert opinions build trust in the writer and in the claim

    • Cons: readers may not trust the experts or may reject the ideas as just opinions

  • Personal observations and personal experiences: writer’s conclusions based on their experiences

    • Pros: personal observations make the writer appear more relatable and trustworthy

    • Cons: readers may believe they are biased and unreliable

  • Testimonies: formal written or spoken statements provided as evidence

    • Pros: testimonies humanize the claim, making it real and relevant, similar to the effect of personal observation, personal experiences, and anecdotes

    • Cons: readers may believe they are biased and unreliable

  • Experiments: scientific procedures that test hypotheses and rely on observable, measurable, and reproducible results

    • Pros: experience indicate that an objective process for gathering evidence and making claims was used

    • Cons: depending on the circumstances and the experiments being done, readers may reject the results

2.4 Defensible and Interesting Claims

  • Effective claims stir interest and call for a defense rather than simply present an obvious, known fact that would cause little to no disagreement.

  • A claim isn’t defensible if it’s not true, it is a fact, or it is generally accepted as a fact.

  • Issues worth debating always have more positions within them than a simple pro or con.

  • When considering rhetorical situation, anticipate the possible points of view, objections, and values held by the people reading the argument.

2.5 Source Materials

  • Quote: using author’s exact words

    • use when the exact language of the original text is an especially good expression of the idea; you want to disagree with an author’s argument; you want to highlight and clarify specific points of data; you want to include information that is shocking or unlikely to be believed by the audience

  • Paraphrase: rewrite the author’s ideas in your own words

    • use when you want to communicate the main ideas in a clear, logical order; the language or syntax of the source isn’t appropriate for the audience

  • Summarize: condense key information from a source in your own words, leaving out some detail

    • Use when only the main points of the source need to be explained; you want to explain an idea found in multiple sources