Strategies for Reading Rhetorically

I. Identify the Rhetorical Situation

Gather the critical data about the text. 

• Setting: Where does the text appear?  How and when is it transmitted and used?
• Subject: What topics, issues, ideas, and questions does this kind of text usually address?
• Participants:
  • Writer – Who is the writer of the text? What do we know about her or him that would be relevant to your reading?  What responsibilities do writers of such texts have?  Under what conditions (e.g., alone, in groups, at work, at home, or for pleasure) do writers write this kind of text?
  • Reader – Who are the expected/assumed readers of this text?  Is there more than one type of reader?  What roles are readers expected to perform?  What characteristics do readers of this text possess?  Under what circumstances do readers read the text (e.g., at their leisure, on the run, or for college courses)? 
• Purpose: Why are these kinds of texts usually written?  For what occasion? That is, why do writers write this kind of text and why do readers read it?  What purposes does the text fulfill for the people who use it? 

II.  Examine Rhetorical Strategies

Now that you have read the text and identified the rhetorical situation, describe the writer’s rhetorical choices and then speculate on the effects of those choices. 

• How is the subject of the text treated?  How does the writer introduce and draw attention to the subject? 
• What is the writer’s motive or purpose?  That is, what is the writer trying to tell us?  Why is the writer telling us what she or he is telling us?  How does the writer make her or his purpose evident, or in what ways is her or his purpose communicated? 
• How does the text invite us to “invent” its writer?  What position does the writer assume in the text?  What sort of persona does the writer project?  What effect does this persona have on the way that you read the text?  Are you engaged?  Why or why not?  And what relationship does the writer’s persona create between her or him and you? 
• Who does the text and its writer imagine as their reader?  How are readers positioned in the text?  What roles are they expected or even encouraged to perform?  What sorts of questions does the text ask you to ask of it?  What textual cues work to invoke you as a reader? 
• What do readers have to know or believe in order to understand or appreciate the text?  How does the writer utilize or exploit this knowledge or belief? 

III.  Evaluate Rhetorical Strategies

Now that you have examined the text’s rhetorical strategies, take time to evaluate and critique the ways in which they are effective and ineffective. 

• In what ways is the text appropriate to its rhetorical situation?  In what ways, if any, does it challenge the expectations of readers?  How well does it achieve its purpose? 
• Which of the text’s rhetorical strategies strike you as being the most effective given what you know about the writer’s purpose and rhetorical situation?
• Which strategies strike you as being the least effective? 
• How else could the writer have written this text?  In what other genres or media could it have appeared or been produced?  What differences would such changes in genre or media make?
• Where and when else could the text have been placed?  What differences would such changes in location and timing make?   
• What can we learn about writing after reading the text? 

The text on this page is based upon a handout by Anis Bawarshi, University of Washington Dept. of English.