Lesson 1.2 · Unit 1 · CED skill 1.A
Exigence: the problem that makes a text necessary
Exigence is not the topic. The topic of Paine's pamphlet is the war; the exigence is that in December 1776 Washington's army was dissolving and most enlistments expired on the last day of the month. Topic is what a text is about. Exigence is what goes wrong if nobody writes it.
- RHS-1.B. The exigence is the part of a rhetorical situation that inspires, stimulates, provokes, or prompts writers to create a text.
- RHS-1.E. Writers create texts within a particular context that includes the time, place, and occasion.
- Exigence: the urgent problem or event the text answers.
- Topic vs. exigence: the topic is the subject; the exigence is why now.
- Occasion vs. context: occasion is the moment of delivery; context is the wider circumstance a reader carries in.
- Constraint: what this writer cannot say to these people at this time.
- Naming it: “X wrote because Y was happening” is the sentence an analysis starts from.
Source: Thomas Paine, “The American Crisis, No. I,” Philadelphia, December 1776.
These are the times that try men's souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered; yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly: it is dearness only that gives every thing its value.
Rhetorical situation (SOAPS): Speaker, an immigrant pamphleteer whose Common Sense had already sold in the tens of thousands. Occasion, the retreat across New Jersey; Washington had the essay read to the troops days before Trenton. Audience, soldiers free to leave on December 31 and civilians paying for a losing war. Exigence is the lever: an army about to walk home.
Exam tip: tie the choice to the moment. “Written for men who could legally leave in twelve days” scores; “written during the war” does not.
Paine's opening does not argue, it sorts. The “summer soldier” and the “sunshine patriot” are categories invented on the spot, and they sit empty beside “he that stands it now.” A man deciding whether to go home at the end of the month is not told he is wrong; he is shown the name he will answer to. The exigence is what makes that cheaper than a reason: the decision was days away, and there was no time to persuade anyone of anything larger.
Write one paragraph making a claim about Paine's choice to price freedom the way a merchant prices goods. Quote no more than six words, and tie the choice to the exigence.
Show a model paragraph
Paine answers despair with arithmetic. Granting that tyranny is “not easily conquered” concedes what his readers had just lived through, and then turns the losses into evidence: “the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph.” Because “what we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly,” a bad December becomes proof of the cause's worth rather than of its hopelessness. For men whose enlistments expired in days, that exchange rate restored a value the retreat had stripped out.
Why it scores: one choice, a short quotation, and commentary tying it to a specific audience at a specific moment.