1.3 Understanding the Rhetorical Situation
Suzan Last; Candice Neveu; and Robin L. Potter
In the workplace, time, as they say, is of the essence. Employees don’t have a lot of it to spare, so when you must communicate information, your best approach is one in which you can maximize relationship-building while also conveying your ideas in an efficient and effective way to achieve your goal. To build relationships and address the needs of your reader or listener, you must have some knowledge about the audience you are addressing. The more you know about them, the better you are able to adapt your message to their needs. Analyzing not only the audience but also the overall “rhetorical situation” will help you to quickly determine your approach or tone, the content, the type of document or genre, and tools you will use to complete the task. The rhetorical situation, in brief, consists of those factors that influence how you compose your message and what you put into it.
When it comes to saving time and augmenting their capabilities, employees are making use of genAI applications to facilitate the generation of ideas and create documents and their various components like images and charts. Accounting for how genAI affects the rhetorical situation as well as your cognitive workflow will enable you to make key decisions on how and when to engage with genAI or specifically with large language models (LLMs) like Copilot. Read on to find out about doing both.
First, completing a detailed Task and Audience Analysis in which you analyze all aspects of the rhetorical situation is a good place to begin as you plan your document.
(The Rhetorical Situation, 2021)
The “rhetorical situation” is a term used to describe the components of any situation in which you may want to communicate, whether in written or oral form. To define a rhetorical situation, ask yourself this question: “Who is talking to whom about what, where, how, and why?” Five components have traditionally been recognized as comprising the rhetorical situation:
- Purpose
- Writer
- Audience
- Message
- Context/Culture
PURPOSE refers to why you are writing. Determining your primary purpose requires that you engage in Task Analysis — that is, determine what you hope to accomplish by writing this document. Ask yourself what you hope the reader(s) will do/think/decide/ or how they will behave as a result of reading the text.
The three general purposes for communication in the workplace are: 1) to inform, 2) to instruct, and 3) to persuade. Within those general purposes, you will find a myriad of specific purposes. For example, your purpose may be to propose an innovative solution to a specific problem. In this case, you want the reader to agree to explore the idea further, or approve funding for further research and development, which would fall under the general purpose of writing to persuade.
GenAI can help you narrow your purpose and co-create several potential purpose statements which you can adapt or synthesize into one that best suits the situation. Given the persuasive abilities of LLMs and their tendency to make up information, be sure that you carefully review the statements so that they reflect your intent, and not an errant one determined by the application. Once you refine the output, you can then proceed to work with the statements to make one that suits your purpose.
WRITER refers to you, the writer/creator/designer of the communication. It is important to examine your own motivation for writing and any biases, past experiences, and knowledge you bring to the writing situation. These elements will influence how you craft the message, whether positively or negatively. This examination should also include your role within the organization, as well as your position relative to your target audience.
GenAI has problematized the notion of “writer,” since LLMs in particular are very capable of creating text that is usable by humans. However, remember that machines can never incorporate or emulate the unique combination of human experience, sentiment, thought, and creativity that makes for the creation of writing or a written text. Rather, to maintain agency when using genAI and LLMs in particular, think of the machine as a “content creator”—that which can create draft content for documents needing review by you, the human. The degree of separation you maintain between yourself and the machine will depend on the cognitive workflow you are engaged in in any particular session.
Here genAI pioneer end user Ethan Mollick’s (2024) differentiation between a Centaur and a Cyborg workflow helps to explain that degree of separation when co-creating with AI:
Centaur: The centaur, modelled on a distinct separation between human and machine, clearly separates human tasks from genAI tasks. In this instance, you would provide instructions and criteria to the LLM and step back as it does the work, as would occur if you instructed it to analyze a large data set.
Cyborg: When working in a cyborg mode, on the other hand, you would be more closely engaged with the LLM, using, say, an iterative prompting approach, guiding it step by step as it produces and revises output.
The key is having some self-awareness about your own range of knowledge and capabilities, and using good judgement about when to delegate the act of writing to an LLM and to what degree you would do so—and when to do it yourself. Knowing your own capabilities and being aware of the constraints of the rhetorical situation will allow you to determine which method works best for you at any given time. Read more on the topic of workflow in Chapter 2.6: Workflow and Co-creation.
AUDIENCE refers to your readers/listeners/viewers/users. Audience Analysis is possibly the most critical part of understanding the rhetorical situation. Consider Figure 1.3.2 below. Is your audience internal (within your company) or external (such as clients, suppliers, customers, other stakeholders)? Are they lateral to you (at the same position or level), upstream from you (management), or downstream from you (employees, subordinates)? Are there identifiers that will guide you to addressing the audience in an inclusive manner? These questions, and others, help you to create an understanding of your audience that will help you craft a message that is designed to effectively communicate specifically to them. Understand also that, traditionally, your document is understood to have both primary and secondary audiences:
- Primary audience: The primary audience is usually the person to whom you are sending or addressing the message or document. In other words, the primary audience is the one for whom you have primarily created the document.
- Secondary audience: The secondary audience consists of all those within the orbit of the primary audience and who may have an interest in the matter covered by the document. You may not necessarily know who the secondary audience may be, but through your audience analysis, you can anticipate who else may be reading the document. As a result, you can further adapt your message to account for these potential secondary audiences.
Your different audiences will have differing purposes for reading your document. Think about what their various purposes might be and how you can best help them achieve them. Considering what they are expected to do with the information you provide will help you craft your message effectively: What is their interest in the matter at hand? What is their anticipated response to your message: Will it be positive, neutral, or negative? How much do they already know about the situation or topic? Thinking about the audience’s needs allows you to determine the appropriate tone and the amount and type of information to include in the message.
| Audience | Purpose for Reading |
| Executives | Make decisions |
| Supervising Experts/Managers | Advise decision-makers; direct subordinates |
| Experts/Co-workers | Implement decisions; advise |
| Public/Clients | Become informed; choose options; make decisions |
GenAI adds a complicating layer to the construct of the audience, as it at once assumes its own audience (unless you specify otherwise) and itself becomes an additional audience you must inform as you are engaging with it in a prompting strategy.
GenAI as Your Audience (Tertiary Audience): As you communicate with a LLM or other applications, be aware that the application itself becomes an additional audience in your writing process. Though a machine, you must still convey to it through your prompts what you need of it. Thinking of it as an information entity and determining what information and approach it needs so that it can help you achieve your goals is one way to approach the notion of LLM-as-audience. Analyzing its needs in a similar manner as you would a human audience allows you to more quickly identify what kind of information you should give it so that it can respond accordingly. Without an awareness of the LLM as an audience, your communication with it risks becoming more random or haphazard and less focused, which will result in output that does not meet your purpose.
GenAI’s Audience Construct: When an LLM or other application produces an output following on a human prompt, it does so by making calculated algorithmic assumptions about the what you need based on the information you provide in the prompt. In so doing, it is constructing you as its audience—and it will also construct your intended audience if you provide information about it. In addition, as the LLM models develop a memory (as ChatGPT 4o has already done), it will also automatically incorporate into the output it creates for you assumptions about you as its audience along with your preferences, which will affect the content it will generate for you. Awareness of your role as audience allows you to take the necessary steps to maintain agency in your interactions with the application. Being as specific as you can about the output you are eliciting can help you to direct the LLM as opposed to being directed by the machine.
Some writers develop audience profiles to help guide their communications. This is a good exercise whenever you have to communicate complex information. Here are some questions to consider as part of the audience profile:
Developing an Audience Profile
Identity and role:
- Who are your primary readers? (specific names and titles, or general roles)
- What is their level of authority? Do they have clearance to view your document?
- What is their role? Are they above you in the organizational hierarchy? Lateral, subordinate?
- Who else might read this document? (secondary readers)
- How might cultural differences affect their expectations and interpretations?
- How will I engage with genAI–what kind of audience do I want it to be?
Expertise and attitude
- How much does the human audience already know about the topic?
- How much relevant background do the readers/listeners/viewers have?
- What is their attitude towards the topic?
- How can I narrow the focus of the LLM or other AI application so that it demonstrates knowledge about the subject I am working with?
Language:
- Are they familiar with jargon (specialized vocabulary) or would plain language be more appropriate for the situation?
- Given their role, would formal language or informal (conversational) language be suitable?
- Given specific language needs, should your document be translated? (applies to documentation sent internationally.)
- How can I inform the LLM on the type of language that should be used in the output?
Finally, business writing often has a long “life span” — a document you write today could be filed away and reviewed months or even years down the road, so make your best effort to carefully address the audience in a manner that will reflect well on you and the organization.
MESSAGE refers to the information you want to communicate. This is the content of your document. It should be aligned to your purpose and targeted to your audience. While it is important to carefully determine which content your audience needs, it is equally critical to leave out content that your audience does not need or want. “Time is money” may be a tired old cliché, but it is important to avoid wasting your audience’s time with information that is unnecessary or irrelevant to them. So, differentiate between the “need-to-know” information, which you must include, from the “nice-to-know” information, which you can omit or place in the appendix of a longer document. In addition, your message should always be professional and expressed in a tone appropriate for the audience, purpose, and context. We will discuss aspects of using a professional style and tone in crafting your message more in Chapter 3.
The LLM will create a message or document that you direct it to create through your prompts. As discussed in Chapters 2.4 and 2.5, it is your responsibility to ensure that the content you use that is derived from the output of LLMs or other applications is accurate, unbiased, and aligned to your goals and values as well as those of the organization you are representing. See Chapter 2.3 for more information about critical issues surrounding LLM content.
CONTEXT/CULTURE refer to the situation that creates the need for the writing as well as the cultural factors that influence how you express the communication in addition to how it is received. The context refers to what has happened or needs to happen and primarily creates the need for communication. The context is influenced by timing, location, current events, and culture, which can be organizational or social. Understanding context goes a long way in helping you create a useful message. Some questions you might ask relating to context analysis include:
- Are you addressing an internal audience or an external one?
- Where is the audience situated: in a business or non-business environment?
- What external factors are affecting the communication? For example, regulatory or legal factors will affect what you can communicate?
- Is this a decision-making or informational context?
Ignoring the context and culture surrounding your communication could result in awkward situations, or possibly offensive ones. It will almost certainly impact your ability to clearly convey your message to your audience.
For example, consider the subtle (and not so subtle) similarities and differences in the rhetorical situation when you offer feedback on Course Experience Surveys versus when you evaluate an instructor on Ratemyprofessor.com. How do the context and institutional culture affect what you write and how you write it?
Remember that genAI applications know nothing about the communication context except for what you tell them. They also only have a factual knowledge of the close relationship between language and culture, so the subtle nuances of the organizational, societal, political, and economic cultures that make for your context are absent. When prompting, include general information about the situation or circumstance leading to your need to produce a message or document so that the LLM or other application can narrow its focus on the subject matter that relates to your communication context. Include some relevant information about the culture within which you are communicating as well. Doing so will result in more nuanced output that more closely aligns with your purpose. For more information about culture and intercultural communication, see Chapter 5.4.
Considering the purpose, writer, audience, message, and context/culture are important steps in the pre-writing process. Completing a thorough rhetorical situation analysis will help you narrow the focus of your work and enable you to engage meaningfully and purposefully with the genAI application.
Knowledge Check
EXERCISE 1.3.1 Identify the differences in the rhetorical situations
| Course Evaluation Survey | Ratemyprofessor.com | |
| Purpose | ||
| Audience | ||
| Writer | ||
| Message | ||
| Context |
EXERCISE 1.3.2 Task and audience analysis
Download: Ch 1.3 Task-and-Audience-Analysis-Exercises
The table below contains a collection of details about a research project you have just completed on the work-from-home (WFH) model. Imagine that you’re writing documents for each of the five following audiences:
- Your supervisor/boss
- Human resources officers
- The general public
- Politician
- High school students
What information about the WFH model might each audience be interested in? As you go down the list, write in the blank spaces in front of each detail the number that corresponds to the audiences that you think would find this detail most relevant.
Consider what kind of document might contain that information for that audience.
| Interested Audience | Table 1. Details About Your Research Project on the Work-from-Home (WFH) Model |
| The dollar cost of shifting to a WFH model | |
| A literature review of previous research on WFH. | |
| Descriptions of digital communication tools. | |
| Some basic strategies for conducting online meetings. | |
| How much the entire project costs. | |
| A log of all your research during the whole project. | |
| A list of everyone who worked on the project. | |
| Minimum specifications for equipment to be used in WFH. | |
| A new result showing a connection between WFH and productivity. | |
| A new result showing the mental health impact of WFH. | |
| New insights into the challenges in implementing WFH. | |
| Procedures you used to avoid statistical biases in your data. | |
| Your plans for further assessments. | |
| Your recommendations for future research. |
References
Knowles, A. M. (2024, March). Machine-in-the-loop-writing: Optimizing the rhetorical load. Computers and Composition. Vol. 71. Machine-in-the-loop writing: Optimizing the rhetorical load – ScienceDirect
Mollick, E. (2024). Co-Intelligence: Living and Working with AI. New York: Penguin Random House. Pgs. 136-143.
GenAI Use
Chapter review exercises were created with the assistance of CoPilot.