By Traci Gardner, with help from ChatGPT
Overview
Imagine this: You’ve just landed your dream internship, and your manager asks you to write an email to a high-profile client. You write a detailed, jargon-filled message showcasing your technical expertise. But when your manager reviews it, they shake their head and say, “This isn’t what the client needs.” Yikes.
So, what went wrong? It wasn’t your technical knowledge—it was your failure to understand the rhetorical situation. Knowing the purpose, audience, context, and how your message fits into these elements could have saved the day.
Whether it’s an email, report, or TikTok-style video for a class project, every piece of communication has a rhetorical situation. Learning to analyze these elements can help you avoid missteps, stand out as a communicator, and make your work more impactful.
So next time you’re tasked with a project, think: What’s the purpose? Who’s the audience? What’s the context? That’s the starting point for success—the rhetorical situation.
The Rhetorical Situation
The rhetorical situation is the framework that shapes every piece of communication. Whether you’re writing a technical report, designing a presentation, or creating a video, your success depends on understanding and responding to the rhetorical situation.
(Long Description)
There are five components to the rhetorical situation (See Figure 1):
- Purpose
- Writer
- Audience
- Message
- Context and/or Culture
If you neglect any of these components as you compose your message, your work may fail to achieve its purpose. For example:
- If you don’t understand your audience, they may misinterpret your message.
- If your purpose isn’t clear, your communication may lack direction.
- If you ignore context and culture, your message may seem inappropriate or insensitive.
When all five components align however, your communication is clear, impactful, and suited to its environment. Let’s consider the five components in an example. Say you’re preparing a presentation on the benefits of renewable energy.
- Purpose: To persuade local government officials to increase funding for renewable energy projects.
- Writer: You, a college student with a background in environmental engineering.
- Audience: City council members with limited technical knowledge but a focus on budget and community impact.
- Message: Highlight cost savings, environmental benefits, and community health improvements.
- Context: A formal city council meeting where time is limited, and visuals will be key to holding attention.
By tailoring your content to these elements, you focus less on technical details (like wind turbine blade mechanics) and more on relatable, high-level benefits, using visuals like graphs to simplify complex ideas.
Examining Components of the Rhetorical Situation
Every time you write, present, or design, you‘re working within a rhetorical situation—a dynamic interaction of purpose, writer, audience, message, and context. These five components are like puzzle pieces that fit together to ensure your work resonates with your audience, achieves your goals, and aligns with the situation. Let’s break them down and see how they guide successful communication.
Purpose
Definition: The reason you are creating the communication. What do you want to achieve?
Examples:
- Inform: A safety manual detailing proper equipment use.
- Persuade: A proposal convincing a company to adopt new software.
- Motivate action: Instructions guiding users to troubleshoot a device.
Why it’s important: Without a clear purpose, your communication may confuse or disengage your audience. Defining your purpose ensures that your message is focused and effective.
Writer
Definition: The person or team creating the message. This includes your knowledge, experience, and relationship to the topic or audience.
Examples:
- A subject matter expert writing detailed technical documentation.
- A student intern summarizing research findings for a non-expert audience.
Why it’s important: Your credibility and understanding of the topic influence how the audience perceives your work. Reflect on your role and how it aligns with the communication’s goals.
Audience
Definition: The people who will receive or interact with your communication.
Examples:
- Internal audience: A team of engineers reading a progress report.
- External audience: Potential customers viewing a product brochure.
- Mixed audience: A public presentation addressing both experts and laypeople.
Why it’s important: Your audience’s needs, expectations, and level of expertise determine how you should craft your message. An effective communicator tailors content to resonate with their audience.
Message
Definition: The information or content you want to convey. This includes both the main idea and supporting details.
Examples:
- A clear and concise message: “Our new design reduces costs by 15% without compromising quality.”
- A complex technical message: Explaining the chemistry behind a new pharmaceutical drug.
Why it’s important: A well-organized message ensures your audience understands your purpose. If your message is unclear, your audience may misunderstand or lose interest.
Context and/or Culture
Definition: The situation or environment surrounding the communication, including physical, social, cultural, and organizational factors.
Examples:
- Context: A company memo announcing new remote work policies after a global shift to remote work.
- Culture: Writing for an international audience with varying norms for professionalism and tone.
Why it’s important: Understanding the context and culture ensures that your message is relevant and appropriate. For instance, humor that works in one culture might be offensive in another.
Additional Resources
Beware monsters ahead
unrevised text copied over directly from Lazt and Neveu
Task and Audience Analysis
Before you begin drafting a document, determine the needs of your rhetorical situation.
Developing an Audience Profile
- Who are your primary readers? (specific names and titles, or general roles)
- Are they above you in the organizational hierarchy? Lateral, subordinate? Outside of your organization?
- Who else might read this document? (secondary readers)
- Do you know what their attitude towards the topic is?
- How might cultural differences affect their expectations and interpretations?
- How much technical background do the readers have?
- How much do they already know about the topic?
- What situation gave rise to this document?
Exercises
EXERCISE 1: Identify the differences in the rhetorical situations
| Course Evaluation Survey | Ratemyprofessor.com | |
| Purpose | ||
| Audience | ||
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| Context |
EXERCISE 2: Task and Audience Analysis
Download Task and Audience Analysis Exercises (.docx)
The table below contains a collection of details about a research project you have just completed on rising sea levels. Imagine that you are writing documents for each of the 5 following audiences:
- Your supervisor/boss
- Scientists
- The general public
- Politician
- High school students
What information about rising sea levels might each audience be interested in? As you go down the list, consider which detail would be most interesting and relevant to each audience.
Consider what kind of document might contain that information for that audience.
| Interested Audience | Categories of Information on Sea Level Rise |
| The dollar damage caused by sea level increases each year. | |
| A literature review of previous research on rising sea levels. | |
| Descriptions of calibration procedures for your instruments. | |
| Some basic physics of how tides and currents work. | |
| How much your project costs. | |
| A log of all your measurements during the whole project. | |
| A list of people who worked on the project. | |
| Specifications of a new instrument to measure water conditions. | |
| A new result showing a connection between sea level and coastal developments. | |
| Procedures you used to avoid statistical biases in your data. | |
| Your plans for further measurements. | |
| Your recommendations for future research. |
Attributions and References
1 ^ Gardner, Traci. “/imagine a photograph of a black engineer reading documents on an ipad in their bright and modern office.” Created with Midjourney. This image is available under a CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 International License.
2 ^ Gardner, Traci. “/imagine a realistic photograph of an asian woman engineer reading a safety manual in a bright workroom on a construction site” Created with Midjourney. This image is available under a CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 International License.
3 ^ Gardner, Traci. “/imagine a realistic photograph of a latino college student intern writing on a laptop in an open space in a corporate office building” Created with Midjourney. This image is available under a CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 International License.
4 ^ Gardner, Traci. “/imagine a realistic photo of a lesbian business owner and her coworkers viewing a product brochure for materials they are interested in buying” Created with Midjourney. This image is available under a CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 International License.
5 ^ Gardner, Traci. “/imagine a realistic photograph of a A complex technical message Explaining the chemistry behind a new product, lying on a desk in an office” Created with Midjourney. This image is available under a CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 International License.
6 ^ Gardner, Traci. “/imagine a laptop sitting on a table in a bright and uncluttered coffee shop. The laptop screen shows an online meeting with two people. A cup of coffee is on the table. ” Created with Midjourney. This image is available under a CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 International License.
Leftovers
Start by doing a detailed Task and Audience Analysis (See Exercise 1) to make sure you understand the rhetorical situation for the text you will create.
Suzan Last and Candice Neveu. “1.3 Understanding the Rhetorical Situation.” Technical Writing Essentials.
Content from Technical Writing Essentials Copyright © 2019 by Suzan Last and Candice Neveu is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License, except where otherwise noted.