Rhetorical Framework

Think about the writing you’ve done in your life. Think about the last e-mail and text message you sent. My suspicion is that, for most of it, you can think concretely about why you were writing. Even writing poetry for yourself, or writing in your journal, you still have a purpose in writing—to document your thoughts, to express your feelings—and an audience, even if that audience is yourself ten years from now, or even yourself today.

Every piece of writing comes from a particular context. All writing has a situation, and there are certain features of each situation that we can look at in order to understand something new about the text we’re reading and the decisions the writer is making. What follows is a list and description of some of those key features all writing shares. These features are commonly called the “Rhetorical Framework.”

Purpose

Identifying the purpose of a piece of writing means that you are able to articulate what it is that the writer is trying to do to an audience through his or her writing. Here are some questions you can use to think about purpose:

What is the writer trying to accomplish in this essay?
What is it the writer wants his or her readers to experience—to think or feel or do—when they read his or her essay?
What does he or she want this audience to understand after reading my writing?

Here are some things to remember about purpose as a writer:

Sometimes purpose isn’t clear until after you have done some writing.
Purpose is always related to your sense of audience.
Sometimes analyzing audience in detail helps you figure out purpose.
Sometimes writing about purpose before you draft can help you find a thesis, a structure, or a plan.
Your sense of purpose can change as you move toward your final draft.

Audience (or Reader)

Identifying audience and analyzing audience helps a writer develop a clearer understanding of your purpose. It is an important guide to you when you are trying to decide what to put in your essay and how you are going to sequence stuff in your essay. Here are some questions to ask about audience:

What do they know about what the writer is writing?
What does the writer want them to know about what he or she am writing?
Why interests do they have in the piece of writing? The topic?
Why do they need to read this piece of writing?
Am I a part of this audience? If not, who is? What defines the writer’s audience?

Here are some things to remember about audience as a writer:

Be as specific as you can be in analyzing what their interests are.
Try to analyze the things that make them the audience you are writing to.
Be aware of the language and knowledge the audience favors.
Remember that writing moves a kind of internal focus on what to say out to a specific focus on audience.

Situation (or Context)

Understanding the situation in which a writer is writing helps you understand the kind of rules he or she is (or should be) following, or the genre conventions that are most important to the piece of writing. We always write in a specific context, and understanding how the writing takes place in a particular context helps you understand what you need to show through your writing. Here are some questions to ask about situation:

What is prompting this writing? Another text? Something happening in the world?
What does this writing have to do with the writer’s current situation?
What has already been said about this topic? How does that relate to this piece of writing?
Is the writer trying to change the situation? To change the way people think about it?

Here are some things to remember about situation as a writer:

Understanding situation helps you develop purpose.
Knowing why you are writing helps you develop your thinking in your writing.
Analyzing audience helps you understand the influence situation has on your writing choices.
Always ask yourself why you are doing the writing.

Voice (or the Writer’s Persona)

This simply refers to the way the writer is representing him- or herself in the writing. As people who write, we have lots of ways of presenting ourselves, sometimes as experts on family, sometimes as experts on law, sometimes as someone searching for truth, there are an infinite number of ways we present our identity through writing. Voice refers to the way you build credibility through your writing. It is about the way people read “YOU” in the writing and learn to trust what you are telling them. Here are some questions to ask about voice:

What impression does the writer want to make on the reader?
What tone of voice is the writer using?
Who is the writer speaking for?
How does the reader see the writer? How does the writer want to be seen?

Here are some things to remember about voice:

Readers will pay attention to the language you use in making a judgement about your credibility.
Readers will notice the kind of examples you use.
Readers will notice how well you explain things.
Readers will detect inaccuracy or lack of engagement with a topic.

Message (or Content)

In its most elemental form, message is made of the thing a writer wants to say about a particular topic, event, or idea.. It is the controlling idea of the essay in some reduced and summarized form. Message is the product of your thinking about purpose and audience: it is what you want to say to the reader, or the point you want to get across. Here are some questions to ask about message:

Can I summarize the main point of the essay in a short paragraph?
Does the writer’s message support the purpose of his or her writing?
Does all the evidence and explanation the writer uses relate to my message?
Does the audience need to hear this message?
Is this message meaningful?

Here are some things to remember about message:

Remember to ask the age-old question about your writing: SO WHAT?
Message is often not discovered until after you have done a bunch of writing.
Another way to think of message is as the largest claim of the writing.
Remember that we pass along a lot of messages in our writing, but in academic writing, one message should prevail as the most important message.