If not every assignment we completed, 90% of our work had been related to rhetorical elements.

My understanding of rhetorical elements:

• Stance: An individual’s position or emotion towards a subject.
• Media: The way of communication or information to be conveyed form one person to another. For example tv, newspaper, magazine internet, etc.
• Exigence: What made you react into writing a specific piece or the situation that leads to demands for rhetoric speech or writing.
• Purpose: What we write will affect who we are writing to.
• Audience: Who will read or hear what your’e writing to. For example, known, multiple or unknown.
• Genre: Types of writing including poetry, drama, non-fiction, etc.

Rhetorical elements are used in writing in order to explain and identify the overall writing.

The use of rhetorical elements throughout the semester have been both easy yet difficult. During writing assignments, I was able to point out the stance, purpose, media, audience and genre easily. To me, the most difficult rhetorical element to implement and understand is exigence. Exigence changes throughout the semester depending on the type of essay for instance, we started with a literature narrative introducing and explain an experience we had. Later on, we wrote essays (an argumentative essay) where our exigence has changed. Initially, I thought exigence was the thing that made you write, my stance but that couldn’t be it since stance is in its own rhetorical element. We didn’t really understand what exigence was. However, throughout the semester we learned that exigence is the issue to the task-what caused the writer to write. The exigence depends on the task. We evolve the use of exigence by what or why we choose a specific topic for the task. It could be based on an experience or what you want to look into based on your hobbies. For example, my exigence to write the argumentative essay is due to my hobby of sports and how I truly believe that the participation in sports is imperative. That is my exigence-the issue that caused me to write. Exigence is still tough to understand.