Reading the Rhetorical Situation

The six elements

• Writer — who is speaking, and what authority do they carry?
• Audience — who is actually being addressed? Not "everyone".
• Subject — what is the text about?
• Purpose — what does the writer want the audience to do, feel or believe afterwards?
• Context — the surrounding circumstances.
• Exigence — the specific problem or urgency that made this text necessary now.

Why exigence matters most

Exigence is the element students skip, and it is the one that unlocks purpose. "He wrote about pollution" is a subject. "He wrote because the river caught fire last month and the council votes on Tuesday" is an exigence — and it explains every choice in the text.

The three appeals

• Ethos — credibility. Built by expertise, shared values, fairness to opponents, or an honest admission of limits.
• Pathos — emotion. Not manipulation by default; a specific human detail is pathos.
• Logos — reasoning and evidence: data, causal chains, definitions, analogies.

Effective texts almost never use one alone. The exam rewards students who explain why this appeal for this audience, not students who merely label.