Rhetorical Knowledge

By Dan Martin

What Is Rhetoric?
Why Is Rhetoric Important?
What Is Digital Rhetoric?
What Are Rhetorical Situations?
What Are the Characteristics of a Rhetorical Situation?
What Is Rhetorical Analysis?
Why Is Rhetorical Analysis Important?
Readings and Resources

What Is Rhetoric

By Kimberly Smith and Dan Martin

You may have heard people call the puffed-up speeches of politicians or slippery statements of corporate public relations representatives “rhetoric.” In casual conversation, the word “rhetoric” is often used disparagingly to refer to dishonest speech intended to manipulate audiences. However, in writing classrooms and other academic settings, rhetoric is a field of knowledge, not a dirty word. In fact, students have been studying rhetoric to improve their thinking, speaking, and writing for thousands of years. Rhetoric is a frame for thinking about how and why people communicate and persuade one another. In other words, rhetoric is a Swiss army knife for understanding human communication. According to the Writing Program Administration, students should be developing knowledge about writing and rhetoric in first-year writing courses. The WPA contends that:

"Rhetorical knowledge is the ability to analyze contexts and audiences and then to act on that analysis in comprehending and creating texts. Rhetorical knowledge is the basis of composing. Writers develop rhetorical knowledge by negotiating purpose, audience, context, and conventions as they compose a variety of texts for different situations. By the end of first-year composition, students should learn and use key rhetorical concepts through analyzing and composing a variety of texts. Gain experience reading and composing in several genres to understand how genre conventions shape and are shaped by readers’ and writers’ practices and purposes. Develop facility in responding to a variety of situations and contexts calling for purposeful shifts in voice, tone, level of formality, design, medium, and/or structure. Understand and use a variety of technologies to address a range of audiences. Match the capacities of different environments (e.g., print and electronic) to varying rhetorical situations."

When you study rhetoric, you can begin to see how people use words, sounds, images, gestures, and symbols to communicate and construct knowledge. This webpage will teach you how to use rhetoric as a frame to analyze a variety of texts. (Remember that a text can be a book, an article, a poem, a social media post, a song, a photograph, a video game or any form that communicates a message). Rhetoric is a lens to help you uncover how texts address specific audiences for specific purposes within specific contexts. You’ll also learn how rhetors, the people responsible for creating texts, design messages around audience, purposes, and constraints.

In "Backpacks vs. Briefcases: Steps toward Rhetorical Analysis," Laura Bolin Carroll reminds readers that rhetoric is all around us, and that "we are continually creating and interpreting rhetoric” when we read and write (47). You might be surprised at how often you intuitively apply rhetorical concepts in your daily life. Consider, for instance, a time when you needed to ask your parents for money. You probably put a lot of thought into how you phrased your request. Instead of bursting into the living room and demanding that your parents give you twenty dollars, you most likely already know how to persuade them. You might remind them that completed all your chores and schoolwork for the week before asking, or that you are you planning to use the money for something your parents would value. You might use a certain tone of voice, or open the conversation with a compliment. "Hi Mom. You look great. That's a really nice outfit." Or maybe you opened your request for money with gentle a reminder of all the times you've paid for something important out of your own pocket. These are rhetorical approaches and decisions.

Because you likely know your parents or guardians well, and therefore know what motivates them, you might find them relatively easy to persuade. But what about persuading your state representatives or your professors? How would you go about writing a letter to an employer about a raise, or a memo encouraging residents in your apartment building to go on rent strike? How do you try to convince someone you don't know to donate money to a particular cause you value? Rhetoric gives you a frame to consider how to manage these situations and make informed writing decisions. Rhetoric, as a field of study, is also concerned with how messages are circulated and delivered in different forms across various platforms. Our abilities and methods to design and analzye texts evolve as technology evolves. Digital texts can be created and circulated more quickly than print texts, and they present unique opportunities, affordances, and constraints for rhetors to negotiate. This means it’s important to consider the mode of communication when analyzing or crafting a rhetorical text. Whether print or digital, performed or recorded, linguistic or visual, all texts that aim to persuade can be better understood through the study of rhetoric. This is because rhetoric is all about understanding how people communicate. By paying attention to rhetorical context, you can read between the lines and uncover the purpose and inner workings of a myriad of texts—including the political speeches and corporate press releases you might have once called “rhetoric.”

Rhetoric is a frame for thinking about how and why people use language and signs to communicate with each other. Rhetoric is like a swiss army knife for thinking. Rhetoric is a body of knowledge for understanding how people interact and persuade each other with discourse, with language, words, sounds, images, and paralinguistic activity. When you want to borrow money from your parents, you don't demand that they give you twenty dollars. You have to consider how they will react to your request and what will motivate them to give you the money. Have you been doing all of your chores? Have you been doing all of your school work? What evidence might you use to argue that you are deserving of the money? That is rhetoric. It is the plan you take and the words you use to persuade your parents to give you money. It requires you to consider a purpose (to get money) and an intended audience (your parents). In this case, you know your audience well so you may not need to conduct more research on them to learn more about how they think and what motivates them. You probably already know what motivates your parents, and you probably already have a plan for extracting resources from them. Maybe you use a certain tone of voice, or maybe you open your request for money with a compliment and reminder of all of the times you cleaned your room last year. These are rhetorical approaches and we use rhetoric all the time. But knowing what rhetoric is and how it works allows you to expand how you use it. Your parents may be easy to persuade because you know them so well and, well, they're your parents. But what about persuading your friends or a professor? How would you go about writing a letter to an employeer about a raise or a new job task? What approaches would you take to address these audiences? Rhetoric gives you a frame to consider these situations and to make and to make writing decisions.

Listen to the Following Podcast on Rhetoric:

The Big Rhetorical Podcast by Charles Woods

Why Is Rhetoric Important?

You are probably wondering why you should study rhetoric. You're probably asking yourself, how does rhetoric have value for me as a writer and thinker? Rhetoric provides writers with an important frame for understanding how writers create texts and readers interact and consume those texts. Rhetorical theories help writers and readers understand how contexts shape discourse and writing and why people make decisions and build knowledge. We often times forgot how important context is for meaning. It is important to consider why a given piece of writing or text was created and who created it. We need to know what motivated the production of a discourse and who benefits from the discourse and who does not. Writing and discourse solve problems and attempt to address an objective. It is important to know, to the best of our ability, what that objective is so we can understand why the rhetor is creating the discourse and who the discourse is intended to engage.

First-year writing courses teach you how to use rhetoric as a frame to analyze a variety of different texts and forms so they can consider how those texts and forms address specific audiences, for specific purposes, within a specific context. Before we continue, I want to define text and discourse in more detail for you. In this course, a text can be a book, an article, a poem, a social media post, a book chapter, a song, or any other form that uses words, sounds, images, animation, and signs and signifiers to communicate a message. Your instructor might use the term text generically to represent a variety of written and spoken genres and forms people use to communicate with each other. You also will learn that rhetors, people who create texts, use discourse to communicate messages to audiences for a purpose, and that there are constraints and limitations that control a rhetor's ability to create and shape a message. Discourse is how we use language and writing to communicate. Discourse can be written or spoken words, and it can take on digital forms. In this course you will learn how people use a variety of different discourses for different purposes. The CWU Writing Program contends that learning how writing and communicating are rhetorically situated and how writing functions across contexts will prepare you to write for a variety of situations, contexts, and disciplines you will encounter on and off campus. Below is an outline of this chapter and some of the main questions it will answer. Click on a question to learn more about rhetoric:

What Are Rhetorical Situations?

Lloyd F. Bitzer was one of the first people to write about rhetorical situations in an article titled, "The Rhetorical Situation" in 1968. He wrote, "When I ask, What is a rhetorical situation?, I want to know the nature of those contexts in which speakers or writers create rhetorical discourse" (p. 1). Bitzer identified three characteristics of a rhetorical situation: exigence, audience, and constraints. We can understand what a rhetorical situation is if we break down its characteristics and discuss them carefully. An exigence is the purpose or reason a discourse and text is needed to communicate. You should ask yourself what is this text about? Why has it been written? What it is trying to achieve? These questions form the basis of stasis theory. Keith Grant-Davie discusses this idea more in his work on rhetorical situations. Rhetorical situations also have rhetors. Rhetors are individuals connected to the rhetorical situation, to the creation of the rhetorical situation, and they can many play many roles at once. A rhetor could be a parent and a teacher who writes for a local community blog about childcare services. Rhetorical situations also have audiences that are both real and imagined. Douglas Park contends that an audience is anyone who sees, heard, or reads a discourse or anyone that is effected by the discourse. There will be an intended audience the rhetor is trying to address but there will always be other audiences the rhetor cannot imagine or expect. In this chapter, you will develop a comprehensive understanding of the rhetorical situation and its characteristics (audience, exigence, constraints, arrangement, style, context, and rhetors), and you will learn how to use rhetorical knowledge to locate, analyze, and cite appropriate source material.

Historically, theories of rhetoric have focused on how the speaker constructs their argument or the argument itself. According to Bitzer, this leaves out an essential consideration, the rhetorical situation, which he defines as “a complex of persons, events, objects, and relations presenting an actual or potential exigence which can be completely or partially removed” by discourse that moves an audience to action (6). In this view, the rhetorical situation calls for an appropriate response. Without the situation demanding change, no discourse would exist. Bitzer describes three aspects of the rhetorical situation: the rhetorical exigence, audience, and constraints. The exigence, which serves as the rhetorical situation’s “organizing principle,” is a problem that can be solved or changed at least in part through discourse (7). The rhetorical audience is the subset of the audience that is both open to influence and capable of making change in response to the exigence (8). The rhetorical situation’s constraints are any material or immaterial factors that limit the ability to resolve the exigence, such as attitudes, beliefs, and facts (8). Without these components, a piece of writing cannot be rhetorical. Bitzer also emphasizes the rhetorical situation’s demand for an appropriate and timely response. Effective rhetorical discourse, then, must address the exigence or exigences at hand and do so at the most “propitious moment” (13). Ultimately, Bitzer demonstrates how rhetoric plays a vital role in affecting tangible change.

In “The Myth of the Rhetorical Situation,” Richard Vatz argues against Bitzer’s characterization of the rhetorical situation, which Vatz says overlooks rhetoric’s role in shaping the perception of a situation. Vatz emphasizes the importance of examining a speaker’s biases, beliefs, and interests when analyzing rhetoric. While Bitzer argues that rhetoric inevitably arises from certain situations, Vatz says that “No situation can have a nature independent of the perception of its interpreter or independent of the rhetoric with which he chooses to characterize it” (154). There are no situations that “require” a response. Instead, individual rhetors use their own judgement to decide which facts to prioritize (156). Then, when communicating about the situation, rhetors shape its meaning through creative interpretation (157). The adjectives and evocative language rhetors use when speaking about a subject are arbitrary choices disconnected from a tangible reality (157). As an example, Vatz considers the assassination of President Kennedy, noting that even the choice of the word “assassination” over “killing” shapes the perception of the event’s significance and the supposed need for discourse, despite the fact that the death of a president has very little impact on most Americans’ lives (160). Ultimately, by framing rhetorical response to a situation as a choice, Vatz’s argument makes the rhetor responsible for “what he chooses to make salient” (158). Therefore, when certain facts are emphasized over others, we can understand this as intentional shaping of meaning and not a measurement of inherent worth.

What Are the Characteristics of a Rhetorical Situation?

You may be familiar with a saying that goes something like this: given enough time, infinite monkeys sitting at infinite typewriters will eventually write all the works of William Shakespeare. When people mention this scenario, they’re often attempting to make a point about coincidence or probability. However, there’s a reason why Shakespeare wrote the plays that he did in the way that he did. From a rhetorician’s perspective, the monkeys-at-typewriters scene ignores one of the most useful rhetorical concepts we have at our disposal—the idea that texts are created within specific contexts. Texts do not just appear out of thin air, and people who create texts do not (typically) sit around pressing random keys on their keyboards and hoping for the best. Rhetors, the people who create rhetorical texts, almost always create texts to address specific audiences for specific reasons. When writing in an academic setting, you are a rhetor too. You may not think that you are writing an essay for a specific audience for a specific purpose, but the teacher handing you an assignment and asking you to do it is a kind of rhetorical context, even if it feels artificial. There are many ways to think about the rhetorical contexts rhetors navigate as they write. One model is the rhetorical situation, which was first described by Lloyd F. Bitzer in 1968. Bitzer identified three characteristics of a rhetorical situation: exigence, audience, and constraints. To understand what rhetorical situations are and how they shape the texts rhetors create, we need to break down each of these characteristics.

Exigence – The Purpose for the Text

When Lloyd Bitzer proposed his theory of the rhetorical situation, he suggested that rhetorical texts are inevitable responses to exigences—that exigences exist in the world and tell rhetors how to respond. Bitzer sees an exigence as “a defect, an obstacle, something waiting to be done, a thing which is other than it should be” (6). In Bitzer’s view, some conditions create problems that need to be solved while other conditions hardly matter at all. In “The Myth of the Rhetorical Situation,” Richard Vatz argues that when attempting to understand a text’s exigence, it’s important to account for a rhetor's biases, values, dispostions, beliefs, and interests in addition to the external conditions of the situation. For Vatz rhetors are never “required” to create a text. Instead, individuals use their own judgement to decide which potential rhetorical situations to respond to and which to ignore. In addition to finding and choosing exigences to respond to, rhetors help shape the meaning of those exigences. Vatz notes that when John F. Kennedy was killed in 1963, the media used the word “assassination” instead of “killing” or “murder” and that this choice shaped how the public thought about the President’s death. Describing Kennedy’s death as an assassination created an exigence of national concern and intensified the severity of the situation.

Think of the last time you felt like you had to say something. Maybe your cousin asked you to give a toast at their wedding. Maybe you decided to stand up for someone being harassed at a bar. Maybe you found yourself writing an email to a professor just before midnight, desperately in need of a deadline extension. These can all be considered examples of exigence. An exigence is the purpose or reason a text is needed, the motivating condition behind the rhetor’s decision to create a text. The exigence might be a problem that needs to be solved, something that needs to be communicated, or an event that requires—or inspires—some kind of response. Without exigence, no text would exist. Read "Exigency: What Makes My Message Indispensable to My Reader" by Quentin Vieregge to learn more about exigence.

You can learn about a text’s exigence by asking the following questions:

What is the text about?
Why has the text been written or made?
What is the rhetor trying to achieve?

It’s also important to note that texts can have multiple exigences. Consider a speech on environmental conservation, as an example. The rhetor who writes and delivers the speech might responds to several exigences that range from simple to complex: the invitation to speak at an event held by an environmentalist organization, the recent destruction of wetlands near her hometown, the need to convince members of the public to attend a protest and legislators to take action to protect the environment, and so on.

Audience – The People Who Receive the Text

The audience in a rhetorical situation is made up of the intended and unintended recipients of a text—in other words, the people who encounter it. It’s easy to assume that a text’s audience is broad. After all, it’s possible for almost anyone to seek out and consume a text, particularly in the digital age. However, rhetors rarely attempt to address every possible audience. Instead, rhetors usually aim to reach the specific subset of people who can respond to the exigence. Carroll explains, “the audience should be able to help address the problem” (49) If you’re trying to convince the university library to waive the late fee on a textbook you forgot to return, you’ll want to speak to someone who is both sympathetic to the plight of a broke college student and capable of removing the fee from your account. Similarly, a public service announcement discouraging unsafe driving would be best addressed to audiences that can drive—teenagers and adults with driver’s licenses, not children or adults who rely on public transportation. To learn more about audience, read the following web resource on audience from UNC.

To identify the intended audience for a text, you can ask the following questions:

Who has the ability to respond to the exigence?
Who would be most likely to be persuaded by the text?
Who has the rhetor tailored their text to appeal to?

Remember that a text’s audience can impact the decisions the rhetor makes. Depending on who a text is intended to reach, the rhetor may use different levels of formality, different examples or evidence, or even a different mode of communication.

Constraints – The Factors that Limit the Text

As a college student, you probably have lots of practice writing within limits others set for you, from required page counts to the time limits of standardized tests. Rhetors outside of academic settings also grapple with restrictions when creating texts. The third and final component of a rhetorical situation, constraints, are factors that limit how the text’s message is presented. The constraints of a rhetorical situation can include obvious limitations such as a maximum word count or a limited amount of time to write. However, constraints can also be more complicated, such as the limits of a specific technology (no visuals in radio) or the facts of the exigence the rhetor is responding to. One way to learn about a text’s constraints is to think about the intended audience and what it might take to convince them to respond to the exigence. As a rhetor, you might have to make different decisions when creating your text depending on who you’re communicating with. If you’re giving a talk to encourage elementary school students to be enthusiastic about science, for example, you won’t be able to use the same level of technical language you could use when talking to graduate students. Likewise, you won’t be able to use profanity to express your enthusiasm, unless you want a brigade of angry parents complaining at the next school board meeting.

You can make some guesses about a text’s constraints by asking yourself:

Were there any rules or guidelines the rhetor needed to follow?
What did the rhetor have to do to communicate effectively with the audience?
How did time, money, resources, and other practical considerations influence the text?

A text’s constraints may be formally communicated to the rhetor, as in the case of rules and assignment instructions. Other times, however, constraints are unstated but go along naturally with the rhetorical situation as a whole.

What Is Digital Rhetoric?

When you make decisions about how to compose messages on digital platforms, blogs, and webpages, you are using digital rhetoric. If you decide to write a blog post and include links to outside sources and embed a video in the middle of a paragraph, you're using digital rhetoric. Digital rhetoric might be best understood using Aristotle's five canons of rhetoric: invention, delivery, style, arrangement, and memory. Consider how these five canons function in print and digital forms. Start with delivery. How do we deliver writing and texts in print and digital forms? What does that mean? How does circulating a text effect how it is read and used? How do rhetors create digital texts knowing that the speed of the discourse has changed? What does the speed of discourse mean?

What Is Rhetorical Analysis?

Rhetorical analysis is the application of rhetorical knowledge to the analysis of a text or rhetorical situation. Rhetorical analysis examines a rhetor caters to an audience, how the audience perceives and digests a text, how a context and moment in time shapes the creation, delivery, and digestion of a discourse. Individuals who conduct rhetorical analysis ask:

why and for whom is a discourse created?
What is the rhetorical situation?
What is the exigence?
Who are the rhetors?
How are my representations affecting the way I'm reading the discourse?
How many different roles does the rhetor play at once?
Who are the intended audiences and how do I know that?
What are the constraints I can see?

When examining purpose, think about what the rhetor is trying to do: to inform, to educate, to shock, to persuade, to entertain, to criticize. What questions is this discourse trying to resolve? What was at stake when the article was first published? How did other events going on during that time affect the text? What other event of cultural relevance might have shaped this text? What was going to happen or might happen as a result of the discourse?

Why Is Rhetorical Analysis Important?

So far we've defined rhetoric and explored what studying rhetoric can teach us about the methods people use to communicate and persuade one another. Unless you’re an aspiring politician or salesperson, however, you might not immediately see why it’s important to study and use rhetoric. What value does rhetoric provide you as a writer and thinker? Consider how rhetorical analysis allows you to move beyond the surface with your interpretation. Humans can only see so much at one time. Rhetorical analysis gives us a deeper perspective of a text and allows us to consider how it shapes cultural perception. Exigence, rhetor, audience, and constraints are the four characteristics of a rhetorical situation that provide a frame for gaining a broader perspective of a text's rhetorical context, purpose, audience, and rhetors that will allow you to make more informed judgments about whether a text is effective or not.

An understanding of rhetorical concepts allows us to make smarter writing decisions. Although the language and structures that writers use in both professional and academic contexts can seem arbitrary to the untrained eye, this is rarely the case. Writers decide what to say and how to say it based on their knowledge of each specific rhetorical situation. The better you understand what audiences find persuasive and how people communicate effectively, the easier time you’ll have writing texts that accomplish your goals—whether you’re aiming for a pay raise at your job or a good grade on a research paper.

In addition to the everyday persuasion we do ourselves, it’s important to understand rhetoric because the world around us is constantly trying to persuade us of things. In John Carpenter’s 1988 sci-fi film They Live, the central character finds a pair of sunglasses that allow him to see subliminal messages in the mass media. You can think of rhetoric like these sunglasses. While an understanding of rhetoric will rarely reveal secret messages that command audiences to “OBEY,” many of the texts we encounter daily are created with specific objectives in mind. It’s important to know what those objectives are so we can understand why the text was created and who it is trying to influence. When we look beyond the surface to see what a text is trying to persuade us to do and how that persuasion takes place, we have more agency to decide whether we want to act on the text’s message or reject it. [Embed clip from They Live, if possible: https://youtu.be/yjw_DuNkOUw]

For a practical example of how studying rhetoric can help us make more informed decisions about what we think and do, imagine you’re a young, broke, tech-savvy college student in the market for car insurance. You’re watching YouTube videos and get served with an advertisement for car insurance that gets your attention. All the people in the ad are young and attractive, and the ad highlights the insurance company’s easy-to-use app. Can you imagine yourself downloading the app and purchasing a policy right? You don’t have enough information to make a smart decision. You need to consider the price of the company’s policies and the quality of their coverage. Using rhetorical knowledge to figure out why the ad felt so persuasive before acting could have saved you money and stress down the line.

Rhetoric is important because we use and are used by it every day. Rhetoric can help us get things done, empower us to advocate for change in our communities, and allow us to see the messages carried by the texts we encounter. Whether you’re writing an article for the school newspaper or watching the evening news, rhetoric is a tool you’ll want to have on your side.

Readings and Resources

The following readings will give you a more complete understanding of rhetoric, rhetorical situations, and rhetorical analysis.

Examples of Rhetorical Analysis Assignments

A Rhetorical Analysis