The rhetorical situation
Before you write a sentence, decide four things — who you're writing for, what you want to happen, what shape the writing should take, and where you stand. Everything else follows from those.
The four elements
Every act of writing happens inside a rhetorical situation, made up of four interacting elements: audience (who will read this?), purpose (what should happen as a result?), genre (what shape does this kind of writing take?), and stance (how do you, the writer, position yourself relative to audience and topic?).
These four elements don't sit in isolation — they constrain each other. A research paper (genre) aimed at peers (audience) to convince them your method is sound (purpose) demands a very different voice and structure than the same finding pitched as a blog post for the general public.
Audience
Audience isn't a vague "everyone." Ask: what does this reader already know, believe, and care about? What objections will they raise? What vocabulary can you assume? A piece written for a class of second-year undergraduates will look nothing like the same piece written for a department seminar.
Skilled writers hold an imaginary reader in their head as they draft — and when stuck, they switch readers and see what changes. That's why "write to one specific person" is the most useful writing advice you'll ever get.
Purpose & stance
Purpose answers "why am I writing this?" Common academic purposes: to inform, to analyze, to argue, to evaluate, to propose. The same evidence can serve different purposes — a study of remote work might inform, analyze its causes, argue for a policy, or evaluate a company's experiment.
Stance is the tone and attitude you project. Stance is communicated through word choice, hedging, sentence rhythm, and what you leave unsaid. "The data suggests a correlation" sounds neutral; "the data proves causation" sounds assertive. Both might refer to the same result.
Flashcard · Unit 1
The specific reader (or imagined reader) a piece is written for.
Check your understanding
A sociology student writes a blog post aimed at fellow undergraduates arguing that their university's policy on AI use is unfair. Which element is the purpose?