Study sheet: Rhetorical Situations Claims and Evidence

📋 Course Outline

1. Arguments as Ongoing Conversations
2. Elements of Rhetorical Situations
3. Exigence as the Writing Impetus
4. Purpose and Writer Goals
5. Audience and Strategic Choices
6. Context and Message
7. Claims and Defensible Positions
8. Evidence and Reasoning
9. Types and Reliability of Evidence

📖 1. Arguments as Ongoing Conversations

🔑 Key Concepts & Definitions

• Unending conversation : The Philosophy of Literary Form, 1941 — Kenneth Burke’s metaphor for arguments as discussions that began before a writer entered them and continue after the writer leaves.

📝 Essential Points

• Almost all writing responds to something, and academic writing commonly responds to texts that the writer has read and discussed with peers.

• To enter an ongoing conversation, a writer listens long enough to understand the argument, contributes a position, responds to others, and eventually leaves while the discussion continues.

💡 Memory Hook

A late guest enters a heated parlor conversation, listens, and adds a response.

📖 2. Elements of Rhetorical Situations

🔑 Key Concepts & Definitions

• Rhetorical situation : Collectively consists of the exigence, purpose, audience, writer or speaker, context, and message of a text.

📝 Essential Points

• The writer or speaker contributes a unique voice with particular values and beliefs, while the audience consists of receivers who may have varied values and beliefs.

• The rhetorical situation influences the strategic choices that individuals make when writing within a particular situation.

💡 Memory Hook

E-P-A-W-C-M: exigence, purpose, audience, writer, context, message.

📖 3. Exigence as the Writing Impetus

🔑 Key Concepts & Definitions

• Exigence : The problem or situation that inspires, stimulates, provokes, or prompts a writer or speaker to create a text.

★ Must-know

• The rhetorical relationship between exigence and writing is a cause-and-effect relationship in which the exigence prompts the creation of a text.

Further detail

• A low test score can prompt a student to write an email to a teacher, while a school board decision to change grading policies can prompt a student to write to the board or speak at a meeting.

💡 Memory Hook

Exigence → writing: a problem or situation prompts a writer to create a text.

📖 4. Purpose and Writer Goals

🔑 Key Concepts & Definitions

• Purpose : What a writer hopes to accomplish with a text and may include influencing, informing, entertaining, or urging readers to take action.

📝 Essential Points

• A writer’s purpose may be stated explicitly in the text or implied through details and choices made throughout the text.

• A writer may have more than one purpose in a single text.

📖 5. Audience and Strategic Choices

🔑 Key Concepts & Definitions

• Audience : The group of people who read or hear a writer’s message and may share or differ in values, needs, backgrounds, and beliefs.

★ Must-know

• 🔄 Audience analysis considers:
  1. Values
  2. Beliefs
  3. History or background
  4. Needs and desires

Further detail

• According to Aristotle, rhetoric is the faculty of observing, in any given case, the available means of persuasion.

💡 Memory Hook

The same facts can be communicated differently to a safety-focused mother and a friendship-focused peer.

📖 6. Context and Message

🔑 Key Concepts & Definitions

• Context : The situation that shapes writing, including its immediate time, place, and occasion and the broader ongoing conversations about its subject.
• Message : The substance of a writer’s or speaker’s main points, strongly influenced by the context in which it is created.

📝 Essential Points

• The immediate context includes the time, place, and occasion of writing, while the broader context includes what other people have written and discussed about the subject.

💡 Memory Hook

Immediate context is when, where, and occasion; broader context is the ongoing conversation surrounding the message.

📖 7. Claims and Defensible Positions

🔑 Key Concepts & Definitions

• Claim : A statement asserted to be true that expresses a writer’s position but is not obviously a fact and therefore requires defense.

★ Must-know

• Writers develop a defensible claim by narrowing a broad subject into a question, forming a specific position, and stating a claim that can be defended.

Further detail

• The broad subject Physical Education can be narrowed to the claim that requiring PE in high schools harms many students more than it helps them.

💡 Memory Hook

Broad subject → question → specific position → defensible claim.

📖 8. Evidence and Reasoning

🔑 Key Concepts & Definitions

• Evidence : Information used to prove that a claim is valid and support the writer’s position.
• Reasoning : Explains how evidence supports a claim by showing the audience how the writer thinks through the argument.

📝 Essential Points

• Argumentation is a cycle in which writers gather information, formulate a claim, provide evidence, and use reasoning to explain the relationship between the evidence and claim.

💡 Memory Hook

Evidence without reasoning remains disconnected; reasoning explains how evidence supports the claim.

📖 9. Types and Reliability of Evidence

🔑 Key Concepts & Definitions

• Types of evidence : Different forms of support that serve different purposes and vary in reliability and usefulness.

★ Must-know

• The course identifies these types of evidence:
  • Analogies
  • Anecdotes
  • Examples
  • Experiments
  • Expert opinions
  • Facts
  • Illustrations
  • Personal observations
  • Statistics
  • Testimonies

Further detail

• Using a variety of evidence can make an argument more well-rounded and more likely to be accepted by a diverse audience.

📊 Synthesis Tables

Rhetorical Situation Elements

Element	Meaning	Question it answers
Exigence	Problem or impetus	What prompted the text?
Purpose	Writer’s intended goal	What should happen because of the text?
Audience	Message receivers	Who is being addressed?
Context	Time, place, occasion, and broader conversation	Under what circumstances was it created?
Message	Main substance	What does the text communicate?