Purpose
An author’s understanding of his persona, audience, and context will help him determine the appropriate arguments and rhetorical tropes for achieving his persuasive goal. Authors and speakers can use only the arguments and communication skills available to them to convey their purpose. The arguments available for any given topic are specific to that particular rhetorical situation and depend on the relationships between author, audience, context, and purpose. For example, skilful communicators recognize the wisdom of excluding or including certain information in the scope of their argument or adjusting their tone when addressing X audience versus addressing Y audience. To fully realize their stance, authors and speakers must also exercise control over the rhetorical appeals and arrangement natural to their topic. This step is the most observable event in the author’s achievement of rhetorical stance because it is the verbal expression of his position in relation to both audience and topic.
Read more about this topic: Rhetorical Stance
Famous quotes containing the word purpose:
“I have never doubted your courage and devotion to the cause. But you have just lost a Division, and prima facie the fault is upon you; and while that remains unchanged, for me to put you in command again, is to justly subject me to the charge of having put you there on purpose to have you lose another.”
—Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865)
“Of what significance the light of day, if it is not the reflection of an inward dawn?—to what purpose is the veil of night withdrawn, if the morning reveals nothing to the soul? It is merely garish and glaring.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Natural selection, the blind, unconscious, automatic process which Darwin discovered, and which we now know is the explanation for the existence and apparently purposeful form of all life, has no purpose in mind. It has no mind and no mind’s eye. It does not plan for the future. It has no vision, no foresight, no sight at all. If it can be said to play the role of the watchmaker in nature, it is the blind watchmaker.”
—Richard Dawkins (b. 1941)