We write all the time. However every time we write, there has to be a reason behind it. Everything surrounding a piece of writing or a speech is important—not just the content itself, but also the context, purpose, and audience. The concept of a rhetorical situation is about understanding why something is being written, who it’s for, and what it’s trying to achieve. As there are the key components that shape a rhetorical situation: the rhetor (the creator of the message), exigence (the problem or situation prompting the message), purpose (the goal the rhetor aims to achieve), audience (the people the message is meant to influence), medium (the form the message takes, like speech or text), genre (the type of discourse), and constraints and affordances (factors that either limit or enable the rhetor’s choices).
These are all very important aspects to consider as we navigate ourselves through many different types of scenarios throughout life. As we are able to speak about things in different ways, depending on our intent, and who we are interacting/conveying information to, there are many ways things could take form. While we may need to be conscious of many aspects while doing so, in order to come off as respectful or understood even knowledgable there’s different ways we may limit the way we speak, dumb things down, or are able to use more specialized terms. Many things go into our writing than we may have originally thought, but they are all parts that make it what it is.
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