Unit 1 · Rhetorical Situation – Reading

Rhetorical situation ● (core concept) — The full context of a text taken together: its exigence, purpose, audience, writer, context, and message. (Example: a mayor's speech urging residents to vote, delivered the week before an election.)

Exigence ● (core concept) — The part of a rhetorical situation that inspires, stimulates, provokes, or prompts a writer to create a text. (Example: a factory spill that prompts an editorial demanding regulation.)

Purpose ● (core concept) — What the writer hopes to accomplish with a text; a writer may have more than one purpose. (Example: to inform readers about a policy and to persuade them to oppose it.)

Audience ● (core concept) — The intended readers or listeners of a text, who bring shared as well as individual beliefs, values, needs, and backgrounds.

Writer ● (core concept) — The author of a text; one of the six components of the rhetorical situation.

Context ● (core concept) — The time, place, and occasion in which a text is created.

Message ● (core concept) — The content of the text itself — what it actually says.

Claim ● (core concept) — A position about a subject that requires defense with evidence or reasoning — not a mere statement of fact. (“School lunch should be free” is a claim; “School serves lunch” is a fact.)

Effective claim ● (core concept) — A claim that provokes interest and demands proof, rather than stating an obvious fact no one would dispute.

Evidence ● (core concept) — The material a writer uses to defend a claim and support the reasoning behind it.

Types of evidence ● (core concept) — Facts, anecdotes, analogies, statistics, examples, details, illustrations, expert opinions, personal observations, personal experiences, testimonies, or experiments.

Reasoning ● (core concept) — The logical explanation that connects evidence to a claim and justifies it.

Syntactic embedding ● (core concept) — Weaving quoted, paraphrased, or summarized source material directly into your own sentences so it supports your ideas. (Example: As King argues, injustice “anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere,” which shows...)