Rhetorical Awareness in College Writing

Rhetoric is its own unique field of study, with scholarship covering genre analysis, workplace rhetoric, medical rhetoric, religious rhetoric, rhetoric of popular culture, rhetoric of games, and political rhetoric, just to name a few popular areas of study. This chapter provides a short introduction to the basics of rhetoric. Your instructor may introduce you to additional approaches to using and analyzing rhetoric in your writing, such as Rogerian Argument, the Toulmin Model, or Listening Rhetoric, while in ENG 102 you will look more at academic genres and uses of rhetoric. Courses in your major—while they might not always use the term rhetoric—will teach you the specialized ways that rhetoric is used in your field to make arguments, build credibility, and communicate with other specialists, clients, and the public. Use this chapter as a foundation for thinking about how language is used in very intentional ways to communicate with others—to inform, to persuade, and even, at times, to delight.

What is Rhetoric?

Rhetoric is the study of how effectively or persuasively a person is able to present ideas when speaking, writing, or communicating through various modalities. Early study of rhetoric focused on persuasion, while modern rhetoric considers all forms of communication and meaning-making, from how advertisers use words, image, and sound to make a product appealing, to how a film director presents a particular worldview, to how video games create emotional responses like fear, delight, or laughter in players. The study of rhetoric itself is wide-ranging and deep, a scholarly field in its own right just like History, Political Science, or Education. In this text, we touch on the surface, enough to help you develop effective reading and composing skills. For purposes of a first-year writing course—which this book is designed for— rhetoric is often employed in two major ways: analytically, as a way of reading; and creatively, as a tool for writers to make their work more effective.

In terms of reading comprehension and writing techniques, understanding rhetoric involves moving beyond basic level comprehension to consider not just what is being stated but how it is being presented. Rhetorically understanding a text means a reader is able to focus on what the author is saying, how information is arranged, and the context of the information. Areas of the text that need to be considered include the author’s purpose (why are they writing), audience (to whom are they writing), style, expectations (both the author’s and the audience’s; this may include expectations of outcome, content, and form), potential biases, the medium of the composition (such as online or print), and any other elements which contribute to its overall purpose.

Questions to consider when analyzing a text:

Who is the author?
What is the author’s main idea?
How does the author support their central claims?
What is the author’s main purpose?
What is the tone and/or style of the piece?
Does the author appeal to any logical, emotional or ethical concerns?

You may have had classes before that used similar questions to look closely at literary texts. These questions can be applied productively to other kinds of texts as well, such as political speeches, advertisements, university announcements, health warnings, and so much more. These questions are also helpful for critical thinking and critical reading. They urge readers to look more deeply at texts, not just to understand their meaning, but to look at the why and the how of what's going on in a text. Understanding the purpose behind a text can reveal a lot. Rhetorical study will help you to realize that very rarely is a text’s only purpose just to inform or to entertain—texts reflect the underlying beliefs of the author or their intended audience, and even a seemingly unbiased piece of writing will often act to either support or challenge those beliefs or world views.

Reading texts rhetorically helps you to become a better critical reader and thinker. One reason to study rhetoric in a first-year college class is that it helps you to become more aware of how the creators of the media that surround us—film, television, news, advertising, literature, social media, and more—are shaping our perceptions of reality. Understanding rhetoric can help you become a more active, savvy consumer of media, one who can still enjoy those media but who also questions and draws their own conclusions.

We also study rhetoric in college classes as a way to become better communicators and content creators ourselves. Studying how others have effectively used rhetoric in their writing can help you recognize strategies that you may use in your own work. In fact, much of learning to write in the discipline of your major or career area is a study of rhetoric: by learning to recognize the expectations or genre conventions of different disciplines and forms of writing, you learn how to communicate effectively within that field. Study of rhetoric in courses like First Year Writing helps you learn what to look for when writing in your major courses and in the workplace.

The Importance of Audience

At its heart, rhetoric—whether using it as an analytical tool or as a means to make your own writing and communication more effective—is all about the audience. We use the term audience to mean readers, listeners, viewers, as well as more active participants, like players of a game or users of a website. Content creators (authors, directors, composers, advertisers, etc.) create with an audience in mind. Effective content creators will shape their work to meet (and sometimes purposefully challenge) the needs and expectations of their audience. When reading another person’s text, it’s important to know who their audience is so we can look at the techniques they use to reach, move, or persuade that audience.

The rest of this chapter addresses various ways authors and other content creators connect with audiences. We’ll start by looking at the rhetorical situation, a way of looking at the context shared by author, audience, and text. Then we’ll look at what are often called the rhetorical appeals, the three major categories of persuading or moving an audience.

What is the Rhetorical Situation?

Adapted from Rhetorical Concepts, provided by Robin Jeffrey, About Writing: A Guide, Revised Edition

During your time as a student of writing, you may hear instructors talk about the “rhetorical situation.” This is a term used for any set of circumstances in which one person is trying to change another person’s mind about something, whether through speaking or via written text (like a book, or blog post, or journal article).

These rhetorical situations can be better understood by examining the rhetorical concepts that they are built from: text, author, audience, purpose, and setting.

Text

Texts can come in all shapes and sizes, such as those listed earlier. But in this context, text is not limited to something written down. The text in a rhetorical situation could be a film, or a photograph, or a recording of a song or spoken history. The important thing to ask yourself when faced with a text, no matter what it is, is what is gained by having the text composed in this format/genre. What are the relevant characteristics of a book versus a song? What might an oral history version of a text communicate that a book version would not?

Author

Here the “author” of a text is the creator, the person utilizing communication to try to effect a change in their audience. An author doesn’t have to be a single person, or a person at all—an author could be an organization. To understand the rhetorical situation of a text, examine the identity of the author and their background. Not only do you want to know what kind of experience they have in the subject, but you’ll also want to explore basic biographical information about them. Where and when did they grow up? How could that affect their perspective on the topic?

Note: You may read in other sources or hear your instructor use the term rhetor to refer to what we’re calling the author in this chapter. The term rhetor opens up a greater range of roles (such as speaker, artist, designer, etc.) and so is sometimes preferable to author. We use the more familiar author in this book for its recognizability, as well as because of our focus on texts in the course this book is designed for.

Audience

The audience is any person or group who is the intended recipient of the text, and also the person/people the text is trying to influence. To understand the rhetorical situation of a text, examine who the intended audience is and what their background may be. An audiences’ assumptions about the author, the context in which they are receiving the text, their own demographic information (age, gender, etc.) can all affect how the text is seeking to engage with them.

The intended or ideal audience often differs from the actual audience in important ways, and being aware of those differences is important when analyzing or interpreting a text. The differences are often most apparent when examining older texts, where our present-day knowledge and values may differ greatly from those of the audience an author originally wrote for. Even in contemporary pieces, texts may (and often do!) reach audiences other than those they were intended for: think of examples when internal corporate documents are leaked to the general public. As writers, consider how your own compositions, both formal and informal, might be read and interpreted by multiple audiences, not just the ideal audience you are thinking about while writing.

Purpose (Telos)

What is the author hoping to achieve with the communication of this text? What do they want from their audience? What does the audience want from the text and what may they do once the text is communicated? Both author and audience can have purpose and it’s important to understand what those might be in the rhetorical situation of the text you are examining. An author may be trying to inform, to convince, to define, to announce, or to activate, while an audience’s purpose may be to receive notice, to quantify, to feel a sense of unity, to disprove, to understand, or to criticize. Any and all of these purposes determine the ‘why’ behind the decisions both groups make. Sometimes the author and audience might begin with different purposes, in which case the author will need to work hard to shift the purpose or telos for the audience—to bring them around to recognizing their purpose as an important one—before they are able to move on with informing or persuading the audience.

Setting (Kairos)

Nothing happens in a vacuum, and that includes the text you are trying to understand. It was written in a specific time, context, and/or place, all of which can affect the way the text communicates its message. To understand the rhetorical situation of a text, examine the setting of both audience and author and ask yourself if there was a particular occasion or event that prompted the particular text at the particular time it was written.

Kairos is often translated as timeliness, which emphasizes the importance of time or timing in a rhetorical situation. Discussion of time as part of a rhetorical situation might range from the expansive to the minute: the early 21st century was a time of great technological change; 2020 was the time for virtual classrooms; the first day of class may not have been the best time for a pandemic joke.

Rhetorical Appeals

Consideration of rhetoric goes beyond the situation that shapes it; whether analyzing a piece or writing our own, we also need to consider the specific strategies that can be used to reach an audience effectively within the confines or limitations of a rhetorical situation. The classical philosopher Aristotle provides us with three major types of rhetorical strategies or approaches, known as the rhetorical appeals. They’re called appeals because they represent ways of appealing to an audience, of giving them “reasons to believe” what the author is trying to persuade them of. These appeals are often referred to by the classical terms used by Aristotle: Logos, Ethos, and Pathos.

1. Logos—Logical Reasoning: An author who employs logos presents careful structure and objective evidence to appeal to the audience.
2. Ethos—Ethical and Credible: When an author makes an ethical appeal, they mean to connect with certain values of the audience in order to offer a deeper sense of the author’s credibility. Ethos can be further broken down into intrinsic ethos and extrinsic ethos

• Intrinsic ethos refers to the ways the author creates or builds credibility within the text itself. The inclusion of source citations in a research paper to show that the writer has based their claims on reliable sources is one such strategy. Another common strategy is sharing information that links the author first-hand to the topic, such as direct experience, training or expertise, or new, original research.
• Extrinsic ethos refers to things outside of or external to the text, but still connected to the author, such as if the author is well known or famous for other work. A celebrity endorsement of a product is an example of extrinsic ethos–the celebrity has nothing to do with the creation of the product, but their (external) fame adds to the appeal of the product.

3. Pathos—Emotional: When an author relies on pathos, it means they are attempting to connect with an audience’s emotions to ultimately persuade them to understand or adopt the author’s claim. Pathos may draw upon the full range of emotions. Remember, a pathos appeal is directed towards influencing the audience’s emotions so that audience members may feel or imagine feeling a certain way— emotion does not need to be the subject of the text, nor does it always need to include the author’s emotions (although it may).

The rhetorical appeals often work together, and are not mutually exclusive: a well- crafted text will often involve all three, linking the appeals together to support one another. A logical appeal (logos) is often more effective if tied to supporting facts from relevant, reliable research by experts (ethos), while connecting the information to something emotionally impactful (pathos). For example, a detailed plan (logos) for providing after-school programs for children in poverty-stricken areas that shows the plight of those children if they do not receive those benefits (pathos), alongside previously published evidence (ethos) of the gains for children who do participate in similar programs combines the three appeals in a way that resonates with policy makers and voters on many different levels.

Types of Logos

Logos is the use of logic and reasoning to convince or persuade an audience to accept a point of view or take a course of action. Formal writing situations, such as workplace and many classroom-based assignments expect and highly value the use of logos. Logos goes beyond the mere presentation of facts and information: it does something with that information; it uses it to make a point, such as to support a formal thesis statement, or to convince the audience to act in a certain way. Logos-based arguments do not always have to be formal: a logical, step-by-step decision-making process of why someone who is buying a new phone should choose one brand or model over another is just as much a use of logos as is a twenty–page report addressed to stockholders explaining why they should or should not support a new business acquisition. The point is, logos (and all the appeals) scale in complexity and can be used in many situations.

Audience

A key area of understanding and responding to a rhetorical situation involves connecting with a specific audience. Beyond simply writing to generic readers or citizens of the world, authors use specific rhetorical strategies depending on their audience.

Before you can analyze how effectively an author engages an audience, you must first think about that audience. An audience is any collective intended recipient of the text and also the person or group the author wants to influence. Ask these questions when interpreting the rhetorical situation of a text:

• Who is the author addressing (professionals, academic community, etc.)?
• What background, interests, or values come into play when communicating to that audience?
• What context does the audience need (situational circumstances, historical context, supporting details, necessary evidence, etc.)?
• What style or voice is appropriate for the audience?
• What is the audience’s perspective in terms of their likelihood to agree or disagree?
• What should your audience do with this information?

Think back to the last paper you wrote. Did you have an audience in mind for the paper? Did it feel like you were only writing to the teacher? Focusing only on the teacher as audience often leaves us fixated on the "correctness" of writing rather than devoting energy to shaping our rhetoric to reflect the values of a specific audience.

Now, consider your most recent Discord chat or Tweet. You were probably hyper- aware of your audience and how what you posted or shared might affect them or what their reaction might be. Knowing that you already have experiences with audience expectations should help you understand the "how" of writing rather than simply "what" you are writing in relation to your audience.

Types of Audiences

The Imagined Audience: You may be asked to write to an audience of your own construction or one that has broadly defined values and interests. Try to think outside of simply writing to your teacher but consider, based on your purpose and main idea, who would benefit the most from receiving this information. What do you want them to do with this information?

Discourse Communities: This should be an audience you are more familiar with in your writing because you regularly engage in the communication unique to this community. This could be cultural languages, social languages, specific types of verbal and nonverbal communication, etc.

Organized/Intended Audience: This is a specific group of individuals who require more specific language and information based on your topic. Maybe you are writing to a group of Economists who require technical/professional dialogue and clearly defined areas of interest. Maybe you are writing to the local school board and need comprehensive research on the policies and activities of the school district.

Tone and Style for Audience

A key aspect of defining and writing to an audience is understanding how tone and style come into play. Style refers to syntactical elements such as sentence length, word choice, punctuation, etc. Whatever your overall purpose is in writing, your style should reflect that in terms of persuading or informing. Tone refers to how your audience should feel once they receive your message. Think of writing an informal letter to your grandmother versus composing a professional email to your boss.

Imagine you are writing an email to one of your instructors. Which of the following examples better utilizes tone and style?

• Dear Professor Sanchez,

I am having some trouble understanding today’s assignment from class. Would you mind if we scheduled a time to meet and discuss it during your office hours this week?

• Hey,

I don’t get what we’re supposed to be doing in class? Help me please!

Do you notice a stark difference between the two? In the first example, the student presents a clear and concise email with appropriate language and well-formed sentences. The style and tone match the intended audience and help to present a clear purpose. In the second example, the student’s purpose is unclear. The context they present for needing help is vague, the tone is informal, and the request for help is too general to affect a desired outcome.

Purpose

When you are asked to define your purpose in writing or to identify the purpose of a text you are reading, you are trying to understand what the author’s motivations are for creating the text. What are your intentions with the text? Analyzing the purpose of a text involves discerning what the author’s rhetoric is being used for and deciding what the author wants their audience to do with this information: Are they calling the audience to a specific action? Does the author wish for them to be better informed on a certain topic? Are they engaging with or contributing to a larger conversation?

Your purpose is only as limited as your intentions in a text. Various purposes for writing a paper include to:

• Inform
• Persuade
• Entertain
• Analyze
• Theorize
• Explore
• Question

In both reading and responding rhetorically to a text, interpreting the author’s purpose means discerning an end goal (persuade, inform, etc.) and figuring out what evidence supports that goal in terms of the text’s central claim/argument and what rhetorical appeals are used. In your own writing, you need to define your purpose through the claims made in your thesis.

Purpose and Thesis

Your thesis acts as the roadmap to your paper, introducing and highlighting the main routes your body paragraphs plan to take. In crafting a thesis, the clarity of your purpose as an author should coincide with the main ideas of the paper. The thesis statement is usually presented near the beginning of the essay. A common practice in ENG 101/102 courses is to position your thesis statement near the end of your introduction leading into your body paragraphs.

The thesis of an essay should encompass your main idea, the major point you are trying to make. A thesis should present:

• A debatable claim your paper can build off of.
• A brief introduction of the ideas and facts present in your body paragraphs.
• Specific conclusions about your topic.

Your thesis statement needs to make a clear and concise assertion about your topic and make some reference to the purpose and direction of your writing.

Good Example of an Argumentative Thesis:

“Author X effectively convinces his audience that Beagles are the cutest dogs through the use of relevant statistics and surveys paired with an emotional narrative.”

Bad Example of an Argumentative Thesis:

“In this paper, I will discuss why Author X’s writing about dogs is good.”

In the first example, an argumentative claim is made about the effectiveness of the author’s rhetoric, and specific examples are introduced that outline the rest of the paper. The purpose is clear in that, after reading this concise statement, the audience is fully aware of the writer’s intention to persuade their audience on why this author’s rhetoric is so effective.

In the second example, the author references their intention (to discuss) but fails to acknowledge any debatable argument or relevant evidence for the body paragraphs of the essay to build off of. By plainly stating, “In this paper, I will . . . ” the thesis comes across more like a purpose statement with no actual claims.

Defining Purpose

When writing an essay and crafting a thesis, your purpose will usually be defined by either the parameters of the assignment or by your own intentions with the paper. If the assignment is to write a rhetorical analysis, your purpose will revolve around persuading your audience to engage with a certain point of view regarding the rhetoric of another author. If you are asked to write a literacy narrative, you will need a thesis that informs your audience on the language and discourse communities of your chosen topic. If you are writing a position synthesis paper, you will need an argumentative thesis that states the parameters of your position and works to persuade your audience in favor of your argument.

Purpose and Audience

Another important factor in defining a purpose is understanding the specific audience you are writing to. If your audience is a vague, general collection of readers, then your purpose will be equally vague. Your purpose should be shaped by the specific audience you are writing to and the desired effect you wish to have on that audience. If your purpose is to persuade a specific audience, you must be aware of the sensibilities and values of that audience. Do they require significant context and background for your topic? What evidence would work most effectively?

Style

Style is how you choose to present your ideas; it’s when the author considers audience and purpose in deciding how best to present information. It’s the texture of your sentences and the words and phrases you choose to employ in your writing. Style is just as important as the actual content of your paper because the way you choose to shape and communicate your message plays an important role in its effectiveness.

The meaning of a text and the way it is presented both play a role in shaping your message, but style can also influence the way a reader interprets or generates meaning from a text based on other writing components. Elements such as tone, diction, and voice either contribute to an author’s style or work in tandem with it to make a work more affecting on the reader.

• Tone dictates your writing’s overall attitude as it relates to audience and purpose. Take into consideration if your writing should be objective, logical, emotional, humorous, serious, formal, etc.
• Diction is essentially word choice and vocabulary in a text. Your word choice should be shaped by the type of text you are writing. Academic papers will usually necessitate formal language, while a casual speech may pair better with informal diction.
• Voice is just as important as tone and diction because it is what makes the writing uniquely yours! Tone may change based on the circumstances of the text, but voice, in terms of expression and individuality, should remain consistent. Your work in English 101 should sound like you—the really smart, well-informed version of you.

All of these factors play a role in shaping one another, so when developing one of them, consider its implications on the text holistically. In deciding your tone, you must also consider the diction that contributes to your tone, the audience you are writing to, and how best to represent your voice.

Example of tone:

Consider you are writing to an academic audience to present your research findings. You likely need a formal tone with informative reasoning that should be logical and credible (logos and ethos).

“Through extensive surveys and interviews, my findings indicate that chocolate is categorically the best ice cream flavor.”

Example of diction:

If you are crafting a paper using a formal/professional tone and style, your diction must follow suit.

Formal - “Professor Riley, may I have an extension on our current essay? I have unfortunately been overwhelmed with work and school recently.”

Informal - “Hey, I haven’t done the paper. Can I turn it in next week?”

Example of voice:

Your voice is also influenced by the word choice of your diction and the tone you choose. Unique to voice, however, is the “persona” you choose to bring to your writing.

• Personal, cultural, and social language preferences can play a role in vocabulary and sentence fluency.
• Authors who have influenced your writing style can shape your voice in how you choose to emulate their style.
• Topics, audiences, and purposes can all be a result of what personally interests you as a writer.

Developing Style

No one set style exists for composition that applies to every paper. Your writing style should constantly be changing and adapting based on purpose, context, and audience. As you mold your style to fit these different rhetorical situations, be aware of how your tone, diction, and voice should also change to fit within your chosen style. Consider these tips when developing style in your writing:

1. Keep your writing clear and concise: Long-winded sentences tend to get in the way of developing a distinct style.
2. Read different authors : You might not know what writing styles interest you until you engage with different ideas and how authors present them.
3. Revise your writing: During the revision stage, look through specific elements like diction and tone to discern if they all effectively contribute to your style.
4. Read out loud: It might sound obvious, but reading your paper out loud and listening to the flow of sentences in your paper can help you catch oddly worded phrases or uneven tones. It also enables you to create more conversational, natural papers.