Lecture: The Writing Process & the Rhetorical Situation
Lecture script · about 15–20 minutes spoken · Week 1
Opening
Think about the last time you had to tell three different people the same piece of news. Maybe you texted a friend, emailed a supervisor, and filled out a form for an office. You did not write the same words three times. You changed them, almost without thinking, because you knew each reader needed something different.
That instinct is where this course starts. It shows up wherever people write. A nursing student writes a care note that a colleague has to act on. Someone texts a coworker to swap a shift. A tenant asks a landlord to fix a leak. In every one of those, the same few questions about who is reading and why decide what the words need to say. And every one of those pieces gets better when the writer plans, drafts, and then goes back to revise.
This is the first week of the course, so we start at the foundation. In this lecture I'll do six things. I'll show you one message written for three readers. I'll give you five questions that explain why the versions differ. We'll use those questions on the topic of the course's running draft. Then I'll walk you through the writing process, show you the difference between revision and editing, and finish with tools for getting started. Next week, in Week 2, you'll turn these same questions on someone else's writing.
1. One message, three readers
Let me tell you a short story. A club member signs up to run the sign-up table at the club's food drive, held at a community center. Then the work schedule changes, and the club member gets called in for a shift. Another club member, who ran the table last year, agrees to cover it. Same facts, start to finish. But three people need to hear about it.
First comes a friend in the club. The text reads, in lowercase, "got called in to work, so I can't do the sign-up table at the food drive. found someone to cover it though. tell me how it goes!" That's 27 words.
Second comes the club leader. The email says the writer has a work shift and can't run the table, that another member who ran it last year will cover it, and that the sign-up sheets and the volunteer list have already been passed along. It apologizes for the late change and offers to help set up. That's 61 words.
Third comes the community center's events committee, which keeps the official volunteer roster. The note reports one change to the roster, gives the reason, says the club's leader approved it, and asks the committee to update the posted roster. That's 74 words.
The choices the writer made there have a name. Rhetoric is the art of choosing what to say and how to say it for a particular reader and purpose. You may have heard "rhetoric" used to mean empty talk. In this course it means the choices every writer makes, noticed or not.
Look at why the versions grew. The friend already knows the food drive and the table, so the friend needs only the news. The club leader has to make the table work, so the leader needs to know who's covering it and that the materials were handed off. The committee doesn't know the writer and keeps an official list, so it needs a clear request, a reason, and proof the change was approved. The note to the committee uses 47 more words than the text. Those words aren't padding. Each one answers a question the reader would otherwise have to ask.
Here's a trap I want you to see coming. Many students believe more formal is always better. It isn't. Send the committee note to your friend and it reads as cold. Send the text to the committee and it looks careless. Formality is matched to the reader.
Pause and try this. The email to the club leader has 61 words and the text to the friend has 27. Why does the leader's version need more, and what does the extra length carry?
Take a moment and picture the club leader reading it.
Here's the answer. The email uses 34 more words because the leader has to run the table, so it carries the handoff details: who is covering, and that the sheets and the list were passed on. The reader decides what the message has to contain.
So keep that picture in mind: same news, different readers, different words.
2. Five questions for any writing situation
Why did the three versions come out so differently? Because each one answered a different set of circumstances. The rhetorical situation is the set of circumstances every piece of writing answers to, taught in this course as five questions: writer, audience, purpose, genre, and context.
Let me give you each one with the question you'd ask yourself. The writer is who is writing, along with the role and knowledge that person brings to the message. Ask, who am I in this situation? The audience is the specific reader or readers a message must reach, with what they already know, need, and expect. Ask, who is reading, and what do they already know? The purpose is what the writer wants the message to do, such as inform, request, or persuade. Ask, what should this message make happen? The genre is the recognizable form a message takes, such as a text, an email, a proposal, or a lab report, along with the conventions its readers expect. Ask, what form is this? And the context is the time, place, and circumstances surrounding a message that shape what it has to say. Ask, what's going on around this?
One more idea sits underneath all five. Something has to make a message necessary at all. In 1968, Lloyd Bitzer named that push in his essay "The Rhetorical Situation." The exigence is the need or occasion that sets a piece of writing in motion. In the food-drive story, the exigence is the work shift. Before the shift, nobody needed a message. After it, three people did.
Now run the five questions on the committee note. The writer is a club volunteer reporting a change. The audience is the events committee, which keeps the roster and doesn't know the writer. The purpose is to get the posted roster updated. The genre is a short formal note. The context is a late change to a community event. Read the note again with those answers in mind, and every sentence has a job.
You'll also meet a simpler picture. The rhetorical triangle is a classroom picture of writing as three connected corners: the writer, the audience, and the subject. It's a fine first sketch. But compare it with the five questions.
Pause and try this. The triangle's corners are writer, audience, and subject. Which of the five questions does the triangle leave out?
Count them on your fingers if it helps.
Here's the answer. Two corners, writer and audience, are already among the five questions, so the triangle leaves out three: purpose, genre, and context. Those three are exactly where the food-drive versions differed most.
And one honest word about all these tools. The five questions and the triangle are classroom models, simple tools you can hold in one hand. Real situations get messier. The questions still help, because they make you look.
3. The running draft's first stage
Across this course you'll watch one essay grow from a topic into a finished argument. We call it the running draft. It belongs to no named student. It's an illustrative draft that every week revises.
Right now the running draft is only a topic: the phone policy for lecture classes on the writer's own campus. A topic tells you what the writing is about. It doesn't tell you what to say. The five questions do that work.
Here's the topic read through them. The writer is a student. The audience is the faculty senate's curriculum committee. The purpose is to get a policy adopted. The genre is a proposal essay. And the context is a campus where phone use in lectures is unregulated.
Look at how much those answers already decide. A committee of faculty members won't share the writer's slang, so the tone has to fit them. A proposal has to propose something specific and give reasons, because that's what the genre promises. And a campus with no rule at all is the situation that makes the proposal worth writing.
What's missing? A main claim. There's no sentence yet that says exactly what the committee should do. That comes in Week 4. For now, the five questions have turned a vague subject into a situation with a reader, a goal, and a form.
Pause and try this. Two students pick the same topic, phones in lecture classes. One writes to a friend and one writes to the curriculum committee. Will they write the same piece?
Think about which of the five answers changed.
Here's the answer. No. The topic is the same, but the audience, purpose, and genre are different, so one might write a complaint and the other a proposal. A topic alone can't tell you what to write; the five questions can.
That's the line I'd like you to carry out of this lecture: a topic is not a plan; the five questions are.
4. The writing process, with loops
Ask people how they write, and many say they sit down and write it, start to finish. Then ask how many times they rewrote their last important email. The honest answer is usually more than once.
The writing process is the stages a writer works through to produce a finished piece, taught in this course as invention, drafting, revision, editing, and reflection. Invention is finding and generating ideas, both before a draft exists and whenever a draft runs out of them. Drafting is getting ideas down as connected sentences and paragraphs without stopping to perfect them. Revision is re-seeing a draft's ideas, focus, and structure. Editing is improving a draft's sentences and surface. Reflection is looking back at a finished piece to name what worked, what changed, and what to try next time. And tucked inside editing is proofreading, the last surface pass, a slow check for typos and small punctuation errors.
Here's the part that surprises people. The process is recursive, which describes a process that loops back: the writer returns to an earlier stage whenever the work needs it, instead of passing through each stage once in a straight line.
Let me show you with the committee note. The writer started with invention, listing what the committee might need. Then came drafting. Partway through, the writer realized they didn't know who keeps the roster, so they went back to invention to find out. Then they drafted again, revised, edited, and reflected. That's 7 stage visits across 5 stages, so 2 of those visits were returns to a stage already visited.
This way of thinking has a history. In 1972, Donald Murray published "Teach Writing as a Process Not Product." In 1973, Peter Elbow's book Writing Without Teachers made freewriting a standard tool. And in 1981, Linda Flower and John Hayes described writing as mental activities a writer moves between, in "A Cognitive Process Theory of Writing." The five stages you're learning grow out of that tradition.
Pause and try this. In the committee note's path, which return shows most plainly that the process is recursive?
Picture the writer stopping mid-sentence.
Here's the answer. The return to invention while drafting. Drafting showed the writer a gap, finding out who keeps the roster, so the writer looped back to fill it before going on.
So here's the misconception to drop: good writers don't get it right the first time. They loop. Needing a second draft means the process is working.
5. Revision versus editing
Now the distinction that will earn or lose the most points in this course. Revision and editing both change a draft, so people blur them. But they change different things. Revision changes what the draft says and how it's built. Editing changes how the sentences read.
Let's sort the committee note's change log. Between the first draft and the final note, the writer made 7 changes. They added the sentence naming who will take their place. They cut a sentence complaining about the work schedule. They moved the roster request from the first sentence to the end, after the reason. And they rewrote the main point from "I can't do it" into a request to update the posted roster. Every one of those four is revision, because each changes content, focus, or structure.
The other three were editing. They combined two short sentences about the table into one. They added a comma after the opening phrase "Because of a work commitment." And they fixed a misspelling of the word roster, which is proofreading, the last pass inside editing. So that's 4 revision changes and 3 editing changes, and 4 plus 3 makes 7.
Order matters. Do the big pass first. If you polish a sentence and then cut it during revision, the polishing was wasted.
Pause and try this. A friend says, "I revised my essay; I fixed all the commas." Did your friend revise?
Hold that word, revised, up against the definition.
Here's the answer. No. Fixing commas is editing, because it works on sentences and surface. Revising would mean re-seeing the ideas, the focus, or the structure, and a draft can have perfect commas and still need that.
Here's the short version to keep: revision re-sees; editing polishes.
6. Tools for getting started
The hardest moment in writing is often the first one. You know the five questions, and the page is still blank. That's what invention tools are for. Let me give you four.
Freewriting is an invention tool in which the writer writes without stopping for a set time and does not pause to correct anything. If you get stuck, you write that you're stuck until something new shows up. Listing is jotting down every idea, detail, or question about a topic as a quick list before choosing among them. The reporter's questions are who, what, when, where, why, and how, asked about a topic to turn up material. And talking it out means explaining the topic aloud to a listener, or recording yourself, to discover what you think. Plenty of writers find their main point by hearing themselves say it.
Try the reporter's questions on the running draft's topic. Who is affected? Students and the faculty who teach lectures, plus students who rely on phones for a documented need. Where? In lecture classes. Why would a committee care? Because a policy decision is theirs to make. Some answers raise new questions, like what the policy should actually say. That's fine. Invention is allowed to raise questions; later stages answer them.
One more thing early in this course. You'll do a diagnostic write, an ungraded piece written in one sitting at the start of the course and kept as a baseline to compare against later work. Write it the way you write now. Save it. In Week 15, you'll set it beside your later work and point to what changed.
Pause and try this. A writer stares at a blank page and decides to wait for inspiration. Which of the four tools would you hand them first, and why?
Pick one before you hear mine.
Here's the answer. Freewriting is a strong first choice, because its only rule is to keep writing without stopping to correct. It turns waiting into motion, and any of the other three would also work.
Stuck is a stage, not a verdict.
Closing
Let me pull it together in the order we built it. Rhetoric is choosing what to say and how for a particular reader, and the food-drive message grew from 27 words to 74 as the reader knew less and had to act. The rhetorical situation is five questions, writer, audience, purpose, genre, and context, and the exigence is the push that makes writing necessary. The running draft's topic became a real writing situation once we asked those questions. The writing process has five stages, and it loops. Revision re-sees the draft, editing polishes it, and the big pass comes first. And four invention tools get you moving when the page is blank.
Next in this module come the slide deck, the Readings and Resources page, the lecture tutorial, the practice set, and the quiz. Then, in Week 2, Critical Reading: Summary and Response, you'll use these five questions to read someone else's text fairly before you respond to it.
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