What am I reading? Who wrote this? Who is it for?

Often readers skip over these questions and never really consider the details beyond that. This page offers a diagram, a video, and a link about digging into context.

The Venn Diagram above illustrates that the interplay between the Writer, the Subject, and the Audience determines the rhetorical situation, aka, the context of the writing.

Genre (how the subject is presented) is in the overlap between subject and audience.

Exigence (why this moment motivates this message) is in the overlap between writer and subject.

Purpose (what the author seeks from the reader) is in the overlap between writer and audience.

Centered in all those factors is the text. Each element combined together creates the context.

As readers and as writers, it is useful to analyze or plan writing with the rhetorical situation in mind.

Graphic from Open English @ SLCC by Justin Jory is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License,