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. What’s my subject? What do I want to say about it? Do I have enough information, or do I need to look for more? Can I depend on what’s in my head — my mind, my memory —or should I turn to outside sources? Who will my readers be? What kind of people are they? What are their tastes, values, prejudices? What common ground is there between us? What assumptions do we share? How much do my readers know about my subject? How do they feel about it? Can I expect them to be interested in what I have to say? What will they be willing to take for granted, and what will I have to prove? How can I make them see what I want them to see, think the way I want them to think, do what I want them to do? Do I need to make my style more personal, more relaxed, or does my relationship with my readers call for a more formal style, one that keeps more distance between us? Is this the fact to be emphasized, or is that the one? Where should I place it to give it the most emphasis? How can I make this sentence say exactly what I mean? How can I phrase this idea to make it both clear and persuasive? Will this phrase, this word, this punctuation mark work with this audience? Questions like these, which range from large matters to small, need to be faced up to whenever you set about writing a paper. Essentially, they’re questions of rhetoric— how to gather, organize, and present your facts, ideas, feelings, and impressions so as to achieve a specific purpose as you address a specific audience on a specific topic. Good writing doesn’t just happen. It comes about because a person who is interested in a subject wants to communicate something about it. Before you begin to write, you should have clearly in mind the particular circumstances in which you’re writing—the rhetorical situation. -----The Rhetorical Situation The rhetorical situation is made up of writer, subject, purpose, and audience, each interacting with the others. Let’s start with audience. In conversation you adjust to the group you’re in. Among automobile enthusiasts you talk about makes and models, mileages and speeds. Among nature lovers you compare notes on hikes and trails, wild life and ecology. And just as you choose appropriate subjects, so you adjust your speaking style to the company you’re in. Though you may make precisely the same judgment about a college course when talking to a dean, to your parents, and to your roommate, you will certainly express that judgment in different ways. You’ll adjust your language to your audience. When you write, you need to make comparable adjustments. If this is sometimes hard to do, it’s mainly because your sense of the rhetorical situation is seldom as keen when you’re writing as when you’re talking. In a composition course you may be bothered by the artificiality of a situation in which you’re called on to write papers that will all be read by the same audience, your instructor. But your instructor will probably set up hypothetical audiences for you to address or urge you to specify the readers you have in mind. To ward off the feeling that you’re writing in a vacuum, get in the habit of visualizing a specific audience for each of your papers — the head of your dorm for a protest about noise in the halls, readers of the campus newspaper for a letter about the problems of bike riders, prospective guitar buyers for an appraisal of the different makes. For other topics, other audiences will seem plausible—the brightest person in your class, say, or a childhood friend, or a group of sixth-graders, or the members of a campus organization, or the readers of Newsweek or Rolling Stone or Harper’s. This last kind of audience is a broad one, made up of thousands of nameless, faceless individuals; but it’s the kind you may be addressing someday in a sales letter or an annual report or some other sort of business writing. Only when you have an audience, real or assumed, are you operating in a rhetorical situation, and only then can you judge realistically how to say what you want to say. There’s much more to the rhetorical situation than your conception of your readers—their tastes, their interests, their views on the subject you’re discussing. There’s the subject itself—your response to an incident or situation or problem or idea. There’s your purpose in discussing the subject—to inform, to persuade, to amuse, or whatever. Together they determine the kind of writing you’re setting out to produce — a term paper in sociology, a movie review for the campus newspaper, an account of freshman registration for the college literary magazine. This element in the rhetorical situation — the occasion — is closely related to the audience but at times specifies the writing job more narrowly. Though many of the same people read the literary magazine and the campus newspaper, they bring to their reading quite different expectations. They know that the articles in the magazine are likely to be more ambitious, more carefully written and revised, more personal than the newspaper stories. The final element in the rhetorical situation is you, the writer. The way you see yourself and the way you want your audience to see you will determine many of the choices you make as you write. Whenever you begin a paper, you should ask yourself who is writing. Naturally, the writer is you; but which you is writing this particular paper? The you who argues about course requirements is not the same you who reminisces about a grandfather in southside Chicago or in small-town Nebraska. The you who tells how to tune up a motorcycle is different from the you who criticizes a television pro gram. And in addition to these real selves, there are imagined ones: the strategist advising a basketball coach, the reformer pointing out ways to improve living conditions in the neighborhood, the laid-off worker telling of the psychological effects of being unemployed. As a writer you speak in different voices and play different roles. You also assume different relationships with different audiences. You may be an expert addressing experts, an expert addressing amateurs, an amateur addressing experts, or an amateur addressing amateurs. And your relationship with an audience may be characterized by almost any degree of formality or familiarity, of hostility or affection. Each different relationship calls for adjustments not only in what you say but in how you say it. The audience-writer relationship determines a great deal about your approach to writing a particular paper. It gives a rough indication of where your writing should fall in the range from very informal to highly formal, where it should fall in the range from simple to complex. And it suggests the degree of intimacy you should assume or seek to establish. The language, you’ll find, offers choices for registering closeness, remoteness, and every degree of distance in between. • For Writing Write a three-minute talk in which you introduce yourself to your classmates. You can’t possibly tell everything about your self in that length of time, and a recitation of facts—date and place of birth, schools attended, and so on—won’t make very interesting listening when you read the paper aloud. So focus on something in your background that will give your listeners an idea of the kind of person you are. Now write a letter of the same length in response to a “Help Wanted” ad for a part-time job you’d very much like to have. Tell your prospective employer (someone you’ve never met) just what your qualifications are. Look closely at the two papers. Explain how the different rhetorical situations have made them differ. |