Busch 2

Jenna Busch

Professor Gardiakos

ENC1102

7 September 2020

Reading Response 1

The concepts of rhetorical situation, genre, and audience all work together to help an

author provide a good piece for readers, while they are still all different in their own way. They

give tools to both the author and the reader to know what they are getting into and hence

know how to analyze the piece before them. These three concepts all effect the way a piece is

analyzed in different ways.

Rhetorical situation, and the way I understand it, is the situation or perspective an

author is writing from. “The technical concept of rhetorical situation brings together

recognition of the specifics of the situation, the exigency the situation creates, and our

perception that by communication we can make the situation better for ourselves.” When an

author is writing they picture the audience and what they expect to get out of their writing

even if they don’t have a physical audience. This shows that depending on your genre your

rhetorical situation will change and so will the way someone analyzes a text. For example, if you

are an author writing a horror film or short story, the way you perform in your situation should

be to invoke fear in the reader, because that’s what they expect given the situation they are

putting themselves in. On the contrast, if you are a motivational speaker and you tell a horror
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story while giving a speech with no sort of motivation in it, the audience, readers, and listeners,

will analyze this in a negative light. They will do this because they put themselves in the

situation to be motivated, they either went to a site to watch a video, read an article, or went

to a speech and got told a horror story. This would leave them confused and irritated that they

did not get close to what they were expecting. The way your text is analyzed is based on what

situation it is in, even if it were a really scary story no one would be happy to have heard it

because that is not the situation they were expecting to analyze. Rhetorical situation effects the

way a text is analyzed because it puts the author, audience, and readers in a place where they

think they should receive certain ideas, words, and characters from the situation and that’s how

they will break it down.

Essentially an audience is the people the author is writing to, the people who are

receiving the words, actions, or sounds and analyzing them. Audiences can vary in a great

degree based on many variables but it is important to know that there is always an audience. In

section 2.5, we learned the concept that writing is performative and because of that it is always

performing to something or someone and based off of the genre and situation the audience

varies. “For Ong, the audience for a speech is immediately present, right in front of him, while

readers are absent, removed.” This shows that the audience when an author is writing is

fictional, but they must imagine an audience in order to get their point across and stay on track.

While in some situations you might not have a physical audience, you must act as if you do so

that when the audience reads the piece it feels as if they were there listening to the author

read it aloud. This concept of fictional audiences is very prominent in today’s lifestyle. For

example, in my economics class over summer my teacher posted teaching videos instead of
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having zoom class at a specific time. In her videos she had to speak and write to an audience as

if they were there in that moment but no one was. You can tell that she imagined and audience

when she would pause to let us catch up on writing or to give us time to finish a problem. This

is what is meant in the book when saying that you have to imagine an audience in order for it to

come across the best way. If she had kept going with no breaks, I might have gotten lost, had to

pause and go back, or just skip the concept all together to keep up. In the end it all worked out

because she talked to her audience and knew who it was, students trying to learn along with

her. With that being said, your audience and knowing who it is also affects the way that an

author will be analyzed. If you write or perform with an audience in mind your writing should

be understood by those people and will be analyzed in a good light.

Genre is a simpler complex that most people have a grasp on, but what some people

might not think of is how genre effects analysis and audiences. Genre is a tool that both readers

and writers use to classify a film, play, writing, music, etc. to make it easier to know what to

expect from the piece. “It is through genre that we recognize the kinds of messages a document

may contain, the kind of situation it is part of and it might migrate to, the kinds of roles and

relations of writers and readers, and the kinds of actions realized in the document.” Genre is an

important tool in knowing how to analyze a text because it gives you context and background

on what’s being written. The difference in genre from say a research paper to a romantic novel

is greatly different with different situations and probably different audiences. This will make the

analysis different from each because one will mainly be informational where you can analyze

the facts, citations, references and so on while the romantic novel you can analyze fictional

characters and their actions/performance. For example, if you are studying and you want to
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listen to some laid-back music to help thoughts flow or to cool some nerves most people would

not pick the rock genre but rather a musical genre. This shows that in different situations genre

matters and will be analyzed depending on what the audience wants or expects. If they click on

the musical genre and click shuffle and a heavy metal song starts blasting in their ears, they will

then analyze the playlist in a negative way because based on the genre that song does not fit

but is still somehow in there. Genre helps to organize works and classify them so the audience

or reader can pick what they know they like and analyze them off of their thoughts.

These concepts often overlap one another because they are so closely knit to one

another in the writing world. Thus, they all effect the way a text is analyzed in a similar way and

should all be accounted for when analyzing a piece.

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Works cited

Adler-Kassner, L., & Wardle, E. A. (2016). Naming what we know: Threshold concepts of writing
studies. Edited by Linda Adler-Kassner and Elizabeth Wardle, logan: Utah State University
Press. pp. 20-40

For this response please begin with an explanation of your understanding of the
concept of intertextuality and the concept of discourse community. In your
understanding of Porter, how are these two related? Then, consider the question that if
Porter is right about intertextuality and its effects on originality, then his article must not
be “original” and he must not be writing as an “autonomous individual.” How does his
own work reflect, or fail to reflect, the principles he’s writing about? Then, think about an
example that is not from academia, but from an artistic discourse community (visual art,
music, TV, movies, etc) and discuss the intertextual elements in that work.
Your Reading Response should be about three pages and in proper MLA format.
Please review the example reading response in the ‘Week 1 / ENC1102 at a Glance’
section of the modules.