Rhetorical Situation: Author, Message, And Audience

According to the Rhetorical Situation, three main points represent the rhetorical situation: Author, Message, and Audience. The authors part in this triangle, is communication. Whether the authors purpose is to be persuasive, or to just get the audience to listen, can be shown in how he or she writes. The message only has one purpose, and that is to be informative. However, the author has another choice to make, and that is to make the message be either simple, or complex. The audience is the third part to the rhetorical situation. The people who actually take the authors words and decide whether it was persuasive, whether it was simple or complex, or whether it was just something to be read. Decorum says that the audience can be any size. Decorum also says that argument is essential to human interaction. How Ursula K. Le Guin wrote, “Staying Awake Notes on the alleged decline of reading”, is one big argument that will be broken down into technical terms.

Le Guin is writing a message to a certain audience. The context of whom her message is about, is not who it was written for. Why would an audience member who does not read, care about why other people are not reading anymore? However, if it someone does read her article, who maybe she was not intending on, she still has to make her message readable for everyone in her audience. Tone and style created by the author helps the audience understand what the author is actually saying. Which is why the author herself plays a big role in the rhetorical situation. Many might not believe what she is writing because she has few sources in her article. The ethos that Ursula has, from writing many other messages, for many years, proves she can write to multiple audiences about multiple