Audience, Context, and Purpose

Definition: The three elements of the rhetorical situation. The audience is who the author is intending to affect with their message. Context is the background information needed to understand the text. Purpose is the message the author intends to convey to their audience.

Example: The audience of A Students guide to First Year Writing are college students in 1^st year English classes. The context of the text is the time period at which it was written in, which determines the writing guides that will be in the book. The purpose of the book is to instruct first year writing classes.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wB1ciiJVKTk

This video shows an advertisement for Special K cereal, these three elements of the rhetorical situation can be seen in this advertisement. The audience for the video are women in their late twenties and older, looking to loose weight in a short period of time. This is shown by the nature of the woman in the video, her shown getting ready for work and determining her plans for the day, contemplating skipping a meal so that she can indulge with her friends. The context of this video are that it was made after 2012, the video shows a modern woman with modern clothes looking to loose weight, all of these factors are influenced by the time period and country, the United States. The purpose of this video is to market Special K cereal as healthy in order to sell more products. 

From the text: Audience, context, and purpose are defined in The Student’s Guide to First Year Writing on pages 181 and 182. The text discusses how important it is to consider the audience while analyzing a text, in order to better understand the rhetorical devices used in the text (Winet, 181). The authors list many examples of context to help the student better understand the concept, examples include the date of publication, the cultural background, and related texts (Winet, 181). In the purpose section of this chapter authors list questions to help students determine an authors message for a text “express an idea or opinion? Respond to a particular occasion or text? Explore a topic?” (Winet, 182).

Works Cited:

 mytwocentsua. "Latarsha Rose-Special K". Online video clip. YouTube. YouTube, 9 Jan. 2012. Web.             3 Feb. 2016.

Winet, Kristen, Brad Jacobson, and Madelyn Tucker. A Student’s Guide to First Year Writing. 35^th ed. Plymouth: Hayden McNeil Publishing, 2014. Print.