Unit 1: The Rhetorical Situation

/ Sara S.

To begin this course, it is important that students have a basic understanding of the rhetorical situation. While this concept will continue to be strengthened and expanded in later units, it is essential to provide students with the basic building blocks they need to create and/or analyze texts.

Student Learning Outcome(s):

  • Identify rhetorical purposes and methods of organization appropriate to topic, thesis, and audience.

Texts for Students:

Lessons & Activities:

  1. Introduce the Rhetorical Situation: Begin this unit by utilizing the Purdue Online Writing Company’s PowerPoint presentation or a similar resource to introduce the basic concepts of the rhetorical situation.
  2. In-Class Audience Activities: The following is from the TESOL International Association. Use one or more of the following to promote in-class discussion and engage students with the concepts introduced in the PowerPoint presentation.
    • Activity 1 – Discussion: Have students create small groups to discuss, or discuss as a class if small enough.
      • Why is the concept of audience such an important component of the rhetorical situation?
      • How does your audience influence what and how you write?
      • What do you think is important to know about your audience? How does it help you as a writer?
      • What should you do if you don’t know who your audience is?
    • Activity 2 – Identify the Audience: Identify the audience for each of the following.
      • A thank-you card
      • A wedding invitation
      • A letter of complaint to an airline company
      • A book review for an academic journal
      • A personal ad in a local newspaper
      • An annotated bibliography for a research paper
      • A college lab report
      • A resume/CV/cover letter
    • Activity 3 – Audience Expectations: What content and genre(s) would be considered inappropriate for the following audiences?
      • A 10-yeard old child
      • A university professor
      • Readers of an academic journal
      • A potential employer
      • A newspaper editor
      • A classmate
    • Activity 4 – Summarizing for Different Audiences: The following is taken from the University of Washington’s Writing Department Teaching Resources.
      • Have students break into groups to rewrite the summary of Lippi-Green’s article (below) for an assigned audience. Have students keep their audience secret to allow peers to judge the summary based on the target audience. Remind students to re-summarize the content as much as possible/appropriate.
      • Summary: Close examination of the distributions indicates that these animated films provide material which links language varieties associated with specific national origins, ethnicities, and races with social norms and characteristics in non-factual and sometimes overtly discriminatory ways. Characters with strongly positive actions and motivations are overwhelmingly speakers of socially mainstream varieties of English. Conversely, characters with strongly negative actions and motivations often speak varieties of English linked to specific geographical regions and marginalized social groups. Perhaps even more importantly, those characters who have the widest variety of life choices and possibilities available to them are male, and they are speakers of MUSE or a non-stigmatized variety of British English. These characters may be heroes or villains, human and animal, attractive or unattractive. For emails, on the other hand, and for those who mark their alliance to other cultures and places in terms of language, the world is demonstrably a smaller place. The more “negatives” a character has to deal with (gender, color, stigmatized language, less favorable national origin) the smaller the world. Even when stereotyping is not overtly negative, it is confining and misleading.
      • Audiences:
        • A 7-year-old who loves watching Disney movies
        • Your friends on Twitter (140 word limit)
        • Radical feminists
        • Someone who works for the production of Disney movies
        • UW Newspaper—the Daily
      • Once groups have completed their summaries, have them share it with the class. Their peers will try to guess who their summary is written for and will decide how effective the summary was based on the audience.
  3. (Twitter) Community – This particular activity is a great tool to use all semester long especially if your students respond well to it, or it can be used for just the few weeks of the unit. Also, feel free to experiment with types of social media. Consider using Instagram like this English teacher or other platforms as desired.
    • First, ask students to create a Twitter account. They are welcome to use their personal one, but they need to be aware it will be reviewed by classmates and yourself. Also, their Twitter account privacy needs to be public so that everyone can read their tweets.
      • You can use this as an opportunity to begin discussing internet privacy and digital footprints if you deem it appropriate.
    • Have students create or use a specific hashtag unique to the class. This presents an opportunity to discuss categorizing information and methods of doing this. You may also want to come back to this idea at a later time.
    • You could have students tweet about:
      • The class reading (take notes, make connections, ask questions, etc.)
      • Live tweet the class lecture and discussion (assign students their own day of responsibility)
      • Ask them to find examples to tweet of a certain concept, genre, etc.
      • Use this as an opportunity to provide commentary on a news article or current event.
      • Encourage them to read and engage with their classmates tweets.
    • This exercise forces students to be concise (140 characters or less) and to make the most of multimodal composition to enhance their message (links to articles, videos, images, memes, etc.)
    • Use it as a starting point for in-class discussion. Also helps with poor computer classroom layout and builds community.
    • Use this as a way to further emphasis the concepts of the rhetorical situation.
      • Audience: this is more complex than just their teacher or classmates. There are also public audiences who may come across and engage with their tweets.
      • Purpose: To communicate what is being learned in class to a wider audience.
      • Topic: Should typically be related to the class or research done for a specific paper.
      • Genre: What are the genre expectations of Tweets? (140-characters, hashtag usage, ability to add images and links, etc.)
      • Context: What is the current context that Twitter provides? (consider trending hashtags, current events, social issues, etc.)
  4. Purpose – Audience & Purpose are closely related. Connect the audience activities to the idea of purpose. If the purpose is to summarize an article for a specific audience, how to achieve that purpose is altered based on what the audience needs. Knowing what you are trying to achieve is essential to actually communicating it.
  5. Genre – The following activity is taken from Florida State University’s Writing Resources. This exercise is meant to help students understand how writers use genres to reach a variety of audiences. Genre knowledge helps students assess the rhetorical situations they will encounter.
    1. Divide students into small groups and assign each group a movie genre (horror, romantic comedy, drama, action, thriller, comedy, documentary, or other). Have students answer the following questions:
      • Genre: What are the conventions of your group’s movie genre?
      • Audience: Who goes to/rents/watches this type of movie?
      • Audience Expectation: What does an audience expect to experience/feel/learn/see from this genre?
      • Evidence: Provide 3 examples of movies that fit this type and explain why they fit.

       

    2. Move to class discussion – ask each group to present their genre while you make notes on the board. Once all groups are done, engage in class discussion to add more conventions or expectations, draw connections between genres, and allow students to come up with genres and conventions you did not originally assign.
    3. Next, ask students to look at their iPods or phones or wherever their music is stored. Ask for some favorite songs and write them on the board. Then ask students to define the genre of each, or ask in which genre the song is categorized in their iPod? Continue class discussion by asking for other genres of music, with conventions and song examples. Ask the class to come up with a “genre bleeder” or song that is difficult to categorize (i.e. Jimmy Buffett’s “Margaritaville straddles country and pop, Black–Eyed Peas’ “Boom Boom Pow” straddles R&B, Hip Hop, and Pop, Kid Rock’s “Roll On” is a country song often categorized as Rap because of the artist’s other work). At this point, the instructor may choose to move back to the movie discussion to identify “genre bleeders” but only for a minute or two so the discussion can move to writing.
    4. Next, move the class into a discussion of genres of writing. Ask them to identify different types of writing – from class reading assignments, to writing they do every day, to writing they see in public. Then organize into categories – genres and subgenres – on the board.
    5. On the board, as you categorize writing into genres and subgenres, ask students to direct you. Prompt them to consider which genres are parallel and which are subgenres of another. Be sure to ask them for a wide range of examples – genres of fiction, genres of professional writing, genres of personal writing (they never see texting as writing so it’s a good one to start with), etc. As they begin to make sense of writing genres, they will offer more examples.
    6. Ask students to identify the one element that is always a factor in deciding on a genre to compose in, whether you are composing in writing, in music, or in film: Audience.
    7. Finally, ask students to complete a journal, in class or as homework. The following prompts can be used:
      • How do you define genre?
      • Does your definition hold true for movies, music, and writing, or does it differ between media?
      • What makes a genre definable, or what makes us able to categorize a genre? Provide an example of a genre of writing and illustrate its categorization.
      • List 10 genres of writing you use here at college regularly, both in and out of class.
      • What are the audiences for the genres you mention above?
      • What genre are you writing in now? Define it and identify its audience.
      • What is the role of audience in considering genre? Why does audience matter?
  6. Introduction to Visual Rhetoric: Use Purdue OWL’s PowerPoint presentation to introduce the concept of visual rhetoric. This will be further explored in later units, but it is important to begin connecting visual literacy with written literacy as early on as possible. This will help students as they make rhetorical choices about their final products.

Culminating Project:

  • Social Media Presentations: Depending on the size of the class and the time available, have students sign up to give short 5-10 minute presentations of various social media platforms both new and old. Each student should present on a different platform.
    • This could include: Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Goodreads, Instagram, Snapchat, LinkedIn, Google+, MySpace, Vine, YouTube, Periscope, Flickr, Pinterest, Reddit, Yelp, Quora, Line, and any other relevant platforms.
  • Alternatively, students could create reports that could be shared on a discussion board so that students can get a feel for the different types of social media available and their rhetorical situation. These texts should respond to the following:
    • The primary medium(s) used to communicate on the social media platform.
    • The types of communities / the audience that primarily uses the platform.
    • How these communities use these platforms. What are their topics? What kind of messages are they spreading?
    • What makes this social media platform different from others?
    • What are the genre expectations for the platform? This covers relevant tips for using this platform (does it allow hashtags, links, memes, news, etc.)

Digital Resources for Teachers:

Academic Resources for Teachers:

  • Ball, Cheryl E., Tia Scoffield Bowen, and Tyrell Brent Fenn. “Genre and Transfer in the Multimodal Classroom.”  Multimodal Literacies and Emerging Genres, edited by Tracey Bowen and Carl Whithaus, University of Pittsburgh Press, 2013, pp. 15-36.
  • Fordham, Traci and Hillory Oakes. “Rhetoric Across Modes, Rhetoric Across Campus: Faculty and Students Building a Multimodal Curriculum.” Multimodal Literacies and Emerging Genres, edited by Tracey Bowen and Carl Whithaus, University of Pittsburgh Press, 2013, pp. 313-335.
  • Shipka, Jody. “Negotiating Rhetorical, Technological, and Methodological Difference.” Toward a Composition Made Whole. University of Pittsburgh Press, 2011, pp. 110-129.

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