[MUSIC] Every day we encounter different context and situations as we go from home to school, to work, to the shops, and back again. You've probably noticed that as you move from place to place, you communicate a bit differently. For example, you probably speak differently to your teacher than you do to your friends or family members. You also communicate differently depending on the tools you're using. Such as speaking face-to-face, texting, or using social media. We make small or large changes in our communication, often unconsciously, as we experience these shifts in context. Sometimes, it's difficult to know the best way to communicate appropriately when encountering a new situation. Maybe we don't know much about the topic that's being discussed, or we're not sure how formal we should be. In a situation where your communication is being assessed such as the university, it can be overwhelming to decide how to communicate effectively. In this lesson, I will present a framework called the rhetorical situation that you can use to analyze different context of communication. This will help you to break down the different features of the situation, and understand how changes in these features impact the way we communicate. The framework we will discuss comes from the field of rhetoric. Rhetoric is a term used by academics who study communication. It is, according to Andrea Lunsford, the art, practice, and study of human communication. Experts in this field study the way communication is used to persuade, in different contexts, through texts. A text is a term used in rhetoric to refer to any piece of communication. Examples of text include spoken conversations, emails, advertisements, essays, lectures and so on. The concept of the rhetorical situation can help us understand why and how texts change in different contexts. Lunsford described rhetorical situations as the full set of circumstances surrounding any communication. There are many different descriptions of what constitutes this full set of circumstances that surround texts. Johnson-Sheehan and Paine give one description in their textbook, Writing Today. Because their framework is focused on writing, we've adapted it to cover the wider scope of contexts by identifying six key elements of rhetorical situations. The first element is the author, the person who created the text. When analyzing the author, we think about this person's background, their objectives for producing the text, and the way this impacts the way they communicate. There are often expectations upon the author, which also influence their communication. The second element is the audience. The person or people who read, hear, see, or touch the text. When we analyse the audience we think about their background and objectives for engaging with the text, and how these descriptions impact their interpretations and expectations of the text. The author usually has expectations of the audience as well. The third element is the place. Where the text is being used and read. We think about the physical set up. For example, sitting around a table at a meeting or reading an article on the train. We also think about the cultural features of the place, and how the cultural and physical features impact communication in the text. The fourth element is the purpose, which is the reason why this text is created. Here we consider the goals that the text sets out to achieve, either explicitly or implicitly, and how it does this. The fifth element is the social and political influences. These are the social, economic, and political features of the setting and they can be complex. They influence the text in various ways, including the choice of topic. The sixth and final element is media, or the tools used to compose and understand the texts. Such as writing, speaking, gesture, images, video, music, paint and so on. We look at how use of these tools gets the message across, and how the other factors influence the way these tools are used. So to review, there are six elements of the rhetorical situation. Author, audience, place, purpose, social and political influences, and media. Now let's use this framework to analyze one context of communication. Imagine you're sitting in a math class in your high school listening to your teacher explain a problem. This explanation of the problem is the text we will analyze. The author of this text is your teacher. The teacher is expected to have expertise in maths. For this reason, he or she speaks more than the students. The audience is made of all the people in the class who are listening to the explanation. These people are students. They're younger than the teacher, and have less expertise in this area. They're expected to have prepared for the lesson, to speak less than the teacher during the lesson, to take notes and to participate when called upon by the teacher. The place is the classroom. The author and the audience are physically co-present when the text is being created. The teacher is standing in the front of the room, facing the students who are seated. The purpose of the text is for students to understanding something new about maths, which will likely contribute to their achievement on homework, tests, and, ultimately, their diploma. The classroom is set up and run the way it is, because of social conventions related to education in high school. The topic has been deemed important as part of a high school education for citizens in this social and political system. The teacher uses various media to create the text, through face to face communication. Writing on the white board, handouts gesture, eye contact and modulating the tone voice. Now, it's your turn. Choose a context of communication from your life, and think through the six elements of the rhetorical situation. In the next lesson, we'll look at the rhetorical situations you will encounter in your university courses. [MUSIC]
