Genre, Audience, and Rhetorical Situation

by: Ajda Alper and Brandon Taylor

To be prepared for college writing there are three key terms that you will need to have a full understanding of in order to create successful writing. Audience, genre, and rhetorical situation are the necessary terms to understand and know how to use for good writing. All of these terms are interconnected and compliment eachother when you are writing.

Audience

The audience is what you must reach out and connect to. They receive the message that your writing conveys. Choosing your audience helps you determine the language, tone, and rhetoric. Your audience is also connected to your genre. Knowing your audience will help you pick a suitable genre for your writing. In Billy Collins’ “Commencement Address at Choate Rosemary Hall,” he is asked to give a commencement address to a class of prestigious high school graduates. Knowing the audience he was going to address he chose a language that they could understand and relate to. It also affected the tone he used. By choosing an appropriate language you can keep your audience interested throughout the entire piece.

Genre

Genre is the type of writing that an author chooses based on his purpose and audience. When you figure out the purpose of your writing, whether it may be to compare, argue, analyze, report, or explain, it is then possible to pick a genre that is appropriate to the purpose. Choosing the appropriate genre is important in deciding your targeted audience that you want your writing to reach out to. Genre can also determine in what way you will reach out to your audience, for example in Martin Luther King’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail”, he chooses to write a letter in which it makes his writing more personalized and his tone more serious. He uses a letter with the intention that it will complement his purpose of writing. Billy Collins considers the genre of his piece of writing as well. In Collins’ “Commencement Address at Choate Rosemary Hall,” he is asked to give a commencement address to a class of prestigious high school graduates. Collins, knowing the audience he was writing to and the purpose of his writing, could then decide the kind of genre he needed to use for this assignment.

Rhetorical Situation

Rhetorical situation is the overall nature of your writing. In a rhetorical situation there is always a purpose or argument, which may be referred to as an exigence, or situation. When there is a situation that needs to be addressed it calls for a rhetorical discourse, or explanation to an audience by certain constraints that may have influenced the rhetorical situation. For example in Martin Luther King’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail”, his rhetorical situation consists of the main purpose convincing the clergymen to hear his cry for equality, this is constrained by whether or not the clergymen will accept his proposal. His exigence is the overall situation that the society of his time was in. His rhetorical discourse was his cry for equality in his society.