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:
“Language, the machine of the poet, is best fitted for his purpose in its rudest state. Nations, like individuals, first perceive, and then abstract. They advance from particular images to general terms. Hence the vocabulary of an enlightened society is philosophical, that of a half-civilised people is poetical.”
—Thomas Babington Macaulay (1800–1859)
“I have no purpose to introduce political and social equality between the white and black races. There is a physical difference between the two, which, in my judgement, will probably for ever forbid their living together upon the footing of perfect equality; and inasmuch as it becomes a necessity that there must be a difference, I ... am in favour of the race to which I belong having the superior position.”
—Abraham Lincoln (1809–1865)
“Man, her last work, who seemed so fair,
Such splendid purpose in his eyes,
Who rolled the psalm to wintry skies,
Who built him fanes of fruitless prayer,
Who trusted God was love indeed
And love Creation’s final law—
Though Nature, red in tooth and claw
With ravine, shrieked against his creed—”
—Alfred Tennyson (1809–1892)