Applying Rhetorical Knowledge to Writing

What does it mean to have rhetorical knowledge? Knowledge of the immediate rhetorical situation of a writing project:

• needs of a specific audience
• specific purpose for the text (Beaufort 221)

Why as a writer should you care about rhetorical knowledge? With the exception of some personal notes and your diary, every text you write has a purpose and an audience beyond yourself. You can have the most interesting and useful ideas to convey in a class or at work, but if you cannot communicate those ideas effectively to an audience who can do something with them, your ideas can go nowhere. Therefore, to fulfill your purpose, you’ll want to find out as much as you can about your audience and how best to reach them, composing your text in a way that meets your audience’s needs and expectations—which, of course, include those of the genre and discourse community.

As a college student, probably your main purpose when completing writing projects for classes is “getting a good grade.” To do so, of course, you need to meet the purpose of the assignment, which might be to reason like a philosopher, or report on lab results, or analyze the impact of a historical event. The assignment’s purpose becomes your purpose as a writer, and you may find even a more specific purpose within the assignment’s parameters as well. You might find an assigned topic boring or uninteresting. Students aren’t the only writers to be assigned topics and projects, of course, and the way to cultivate interest and engagement—that sense of purpose—is to immerse yourself in learning as much as you can about the topic.

If you ever feel sorry for yourself as a student writer, think about this: the only time your audience actually has to read what you wrote is right now as a student in your classes. In workplace rhetorical situations—like when you’re writing a resume to apply for a job, composing a letter asking for a raise, or creating a fundraising campaign—your readers may read little if any of what you worked so hard to write. So, take advantage of this opportunity now as a student sharing your work with instructors and others—a captive and eager audience—who will take the time to carefully review what you write.

Prewriting for Rhetorical Knowledge

• What do I know about my rhetorical situation for the writing project I am working on?
• What decisions will I need to make as a writer to meet the purpose and audience, for example?

To think rhetorically as a writer about audience and purpose is to consider the following kinds of questions about a text you are preparing to write.

• Who do you know, or anticipate, will be reading this text? What do they know or not know about the subject or issue? What are their relevant experiences, positions, or values? What stance(s) might they hold? What’s the best way to reach this audience? What does the audience need or expect from this text? When, where, and how will the audience encounter this text?
• Who are your ideal readers? How are they similar to or different from other audiences for this text? Do they share the same or different experiences, positions, or values as other audiences? How can you signal that audience in your text, using what cues by what and how you write? What roles can you create for your audience in the text?
• What is your motivation for writing this text? What is your goal for the text? What prompted you to compose this text? What is your response? How does the text you are composing support this response? What do you want your audience to do, feel, or think?

When rhetorical knowledge gets messy. . . Have you ever noticed how clean and neat some ideas look in, well, textbooks, but in practice they get messy? In practice, rhetoric is quite complex and is full of much scholarly debate. As directed by your instructor, dig deeper into the elements of rhetorical situations for writers by considering the topics and questions below. You may first wish to read Keith Grant-Davie’s journal article “Rhetorical Situations and Their Constituents” and then the other scholarly texts that are referenced below for a more thorough exploration of elements of rhetorical situations.

James E. Porter in “Intertextuality and the Discourse Community” counters the romantic and independent image of writers by emphasizing the sources and social context within which a writer’s text is composed. He claims that the intertext—the great web of texts built on and referring to each other—makes individual writers less important. He writes, “According to this view, authorial intention is less significant than social context; the writer is simply part of a discourse tradition, a member of a team, and a participant in a community of discourse that creates its own collective meaning. Thus the intertext constrains writing” (Porter 35 emphasis in original). His argument avoids two extreme views about writing—one extreme that writers can write outside of any social context and the other extreme that all writers are plagiarists and can write nothing new and original. Instead, his middle-ground stance is the following: “Writing is an attempt to exercise the will, to identify the self within the constraints of some discourse community” (41). How does Porter’s discussion of the intertext add to, change, complement, or complicate your understanding of the rhetorical situation elements of constraint and rhetor (author/writer)? To what extent are writers constrained when they compose? To what extent are writers free?

Donald Murray in “All Writing Is Autobiography” explains, “I have my own peculiar way of looking at the world and my own way of using language to communicate what I see” (67), and he claims that we are all this autobiographical when we write. What does autobiography mean—how is that word usually used? How is Murray using it here? How is a writer autobiographical in a memoir or personal story as compared to lab report or philosophy argument? What’s similar? What’s different? What about in a text that was researched and composed collaboratively with multiple authors? Or sponsored by an organization? Do you think there is a distinction between the writer(s) and the ethos of the text—the way the writer sounds or comes across and what they represent? How does this connect with discourse community? How does a text represent an ideology, a way of viewing the world, creating a version of reality based on choice of words and sentence constructions and what is the writer’s role? How might a writer construct a type of relationship between him or herself and readers? How might the writer draw upon and reinforce the larger systems of belief and knowledge that govern what counts as right or wrong, good or bad, and normal or abnormal in the text?

Lisa Ede and Andrea Lunsford in “Audience Addressed/Audience Invoked: The Role of Audience in Composition Theory and Pedagogy” discuss two models for thinking about audience. The first is “audience addressed,” which are “the actual or intended readers of a discourse” and this audience “exists outside of the text” (167). In this model writers “may analyze these readers’ needs, anticipate their biases, even defer to their wishes” (Ede and Lunsford 167). The second model for audience is “audience invoked,” which is an audience imagined or created by writers as they compose a text. In this model, rather than analyzing an audience, the writer “uses semantic and syntactic resources of language to provide cues for the reader—cues which help to define the role or roles the writer wishes the reader to adopt in responding to the text” (160). Ede and Lunsford point out the limitations to both models and argue for one that “suggests the integrated, interdependent nature of reading and writing” (169). They claim, “A fully elaborated view of audience, then, must balance the creativity of the writer with the different, but equally important, creativity of the reader. It must account for a wide and shifting range or roles for both addressed and invoked audiences. And, finally, it must relate the matrix created by the intricate relationship of writer and audience to all elements in the rhetorical situation” (Ede and Lunsford 169-70). In short, the role of audience is also part of the purpose of the text, etc. To what extent can writers craft their texts to both reach intended audiences and create audiences? How might writers balance both and how does this look or show up in a text? To what extent does a writer engage with an audience in a text? And how does work in a discourse community?