Rhetorical Situation

In Motives for Writing (the current English 1101/1102 textbook), Robert Keith Miller explains:

Any act of writing involves five elements that together form what is called the rhetorical situation:

• Author
• Audience
• Purpose
• Topic
• Context

As writers pursue different motives, they emphasize certain elements of the rhetorical situation over others.  Writing about personal experience focuses mainly on satisfying the needs of the writer.  Persuading, inspiring, and amusing others focus mainly on eliciting appropriate responses from the audience.  Although reporting and interpreting information, evaluating something, and analyzing images or texts satisfy the writer's needs and require the writer to think about the reader's needs, they all focus to varying degrees on the subject matter or topic.  Whatever your emphasis, though, you can seldom lose sight of any of these elements of the rhetorical situation for long.  (2)

A paper that is awarded with an A in a composition class at SSU should indicate that the writer has carefully considered all five elements of the rhetorical situation.  A paper that receives an F may fail to consider one or more elements.  For example, if a student submits an emotional, persuasive paper when the assignment calls for an unbiased, informative paper, that paper may fail because the student has failed to consider the purpose of the paper.