Lesson 1.1 · Unit 1 · CED skill 1.A
The rhetorical situation: who is speaking, to whom, and why
Every text is somebody's answer to something. Before you can explain how a piece of writing works, you have to know what it was answering: the problem, the writer, the people addressed, what the writer wanted from them. Skip that and you write “the author uses a serious tone”: a guess about a feeling, not a claim about a choice.
- RHS-1.A. The rhetorical situation of a text collectively refers to the exigence, purpose, audience, writer, context, and message.
- RHS-1.D. An audience of a text has shared as well as individual beliefs, values, needs, and backgrounds.
- RHS-1.E. Writers create texts within a particular context that includes the time, place, and occasion.
- Exigence: the problem that makes this text necessary now.
- Writer and audience: who speaks, what credibility they hold, and what the people addressed already believe.
- Purpose: the effect sought: moving this audience from here to there.
- Context and message: the surrounding circumstances, and the claim finally delivered.
- SOAPS: speaker, occasion, audience, purpose, subject: the same checklist, fast enough to run in a margin.
Source: Abraham Lincoln, Gettysburg Address, Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, November 19, 1863.
Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal. Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. … We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live.
Rhetorical situation (SOAPS): Speaker, a wartime president whose reelection was in doubt. Occasion, a soldiers' cemetery dedicated four months after the battle. Audience, the crowd at the graves and the much larger one reading the text in the morning papers. Purpose controls the rest: Lincoln came not to mourn but to turn a burial into a reason to keep fighting.
Exam tip: “What is the tone?” is the wrong first question. Tone is a result. Ask what the writer needed from this audience.
Lincoln's most consequential choice is a date he never names. Counting “four score and seven years” back from 1863 lands on 1776, not 1787, on the Declaration's proposition of equality rather than a Constitution that protected slavery. A crowd that came to bury soldiers is handed a founding it must now finish. Making the war a test of whether a nation “so conceived” can endure then lets him ask for more war without naming a battle or an enemy.
An audience is never one mind. Its members share beliefs, values, needs, and backgrounds, and each of them also holds individual ones. Lincoln's crowd shared grief and loyalty to the Union, but a mother who had lost a son and a politician who opposed the war did not need the same thing from him. A writer who can name both the shared ground and the individual differences can decide what to say to everyone and what to leave unsaid.
Write one paragraph claiming something about Lincoln's choice to describe the nation as a living thing. Quote no more than six words, and explain how that choice serves his purpose.
Show a model paragraph
Lincoln describes the country as a living body so that its death becomes thinkable and its survival becomes his audience's job. The nation is “brought forth” and “conceived,” words borrowed from birth, and what he asks is whether it “can long endure.” The soldiers then “gave their lives that that nation might live.” For mourners standing in a cemetery, that turns private grief into a debt owed to something still alive.
Why it scores: one choice, a short quotation, and commentary on how that choice works on this audience, the “how” Row B rewards.