Stance is the term which depicts your position on the thing that you’re looking into. A stance in writing also allows the audience to understand what you’re pushing for or an idea that you’re attempting to convey. For example, if I were to write an argumentative essay on cats and dogs. If I argued that cats were better than dogs then my stance on this topic would be in favor of cats. The audience also understands that the essay would be an explanation of why cats are better than dogs rather than vice versa.  Another example of this would be …

Purpose could be defined as the ‘what aspect’ of your document, what you’ve written and what it intents to do. With every assignment that’s been composed in this class there has been a purpose or reason as to what it’s been composed. For instance, the memo assignment. The prompt of the memo assignment was to look into an issue which is on CCNY and discuss how it can be solved. My group had chosen to discuss improving the Cleared4 system, and I talked about implementing a new Cleared4 site or an application which is dedicated to it. This was done …

Media or Medium are considered the tools which are used to convey an opinion or idea to a reader. A good example of this would be the proposal which was utilized to show the project we had in mind would be a good solution to the problem at hand. One of our mediums in this situation was the proposal as it showed our idea, explained every component of it, and emphasized on why this compared to other solutions would be one of the best.

Genre can be considered the formatting or template that you use in order to find a way in which information is conveniently presented to the audience. Similarly to media, genre is what’s used to present or convey our idea. However, genre is the formatting which is determined by audience. Media is all the tools and components which allow you to convey your idea. So this would include the formatting, the pictures, the references, and anything else which allows you to get to that idea.

Exigence could be defined as the ‘why aspect’ of your document. Exigence is what prompted you to construct the document or what drove you to talk about this certain topic. Something which portrays exigence well is the Proposal in which we chose an area which had been affected by a natural disaster and provided a solution to it. The exigence or reason as to why we had created this proposal was because of Hurricane Harvey which had hit the City Hall of Houston in August of 2017. We wanted to ensure that if anything like Hurricane Harvey ever arises then …

Audience refers to the people your document is for or who you think would be reading it. Audience is one of the most important rhetorical terms, this being because audience usually determines how the rest of the terms are defined in the situation. For example, if your audience are third graders then you would probably create a simple document which contains a variety of pictures and not too many words in your document. Whereas if your audience is an organization ran by the president then you would probably utilize a memo which is brief and straight to the point.