What is the rhetorical situation?●What occasion gives rise to the need or opportunity for persuasion?●What is the historical occasion that would give rise to the composition of thistext?Who is the author/speaker?●How does he or she establish ethos (personal credibility)?
●Does he/she come across as knowledgeable? fair?
●Does the speaker’s reputation convey a certain authority?What is his/her intention in speaking?
●To attack or defend?
●To exhort or dissuade from certain action?●To praise or blame?●To teach, to delight, or to persuade?Who makes up the audience?
●Who is the intended audience?●What values does the audience hold that the author or speaker appeals to?●Who have been or might be secondary audiences?●If this is a work of fiction, what is the nature of the audience within the fiction?What is the content of the message?●Can you summarize the main idea?
●What are the principal lines of reasoning or kinds of arguments used?
●How does the author or speaker appeal to reason? to emotion?What is the form in which it is conveyed?
●What is the structure of the communication; how is it arranged?
●What oral or literary genre is it following?
●What are figures of speech (schemes and tropes) used?
●What kind of style and tone is used and for what purpose?How do form and content correspond?
●Does the form complement the content?
●What effect could the form have, and does this aid or hinder the author’sintention?Does the message/speech/text succeed in fulfillingthe author’s or speaker’s intentions?
●For whom?●Does the author/speaker effectively fit his/her message to the circumstances,times, and audience?
●Can you identify the responses of historical or contemporary audiences?What does the nature of the communication revealabout the culture that produced it?●What kinds of values or customs would the people have that would producethis?●How do the allusions, historical references, or kinds of words used place thisin a certain time and location?