Reading Response: Grant-Davie "Rhetorical Situations and Their Constituents” Excerpts

Assignment Requirements:

To help you learn to read critically and incorporate effective textual support, you will complete reading responses for several of the assigned readings this semester. Reading responses ask you to use direct evidence from the course readings to answer a prompting a question. This means that each reading response should include at least one quote or paraphrase from the assigned text.

Reading Responses should be uploaded as a Microsoft Word document using MLA or APA formatting (including an APA title page or MLA header) and in-text citations and a Works Cited/References page. There is no word count for these responses, but you should be thoroughly answering the question with specific evidence that is incorporated into your own writing. To do this, I recommend around 250 words, but you're welcome to write more or less if you feel like that's what you need to answer the question.

This Week's Prompt: 

Read Keith Grant Davie's article "Rhetorical Situations and Their Constituents." For this article, you are trying to glean two main things: (a) what a rhetorical situation is made of and (b) why writers and readers should care about it. Remember, reading this article is setting you up to do a situational analysis for your Major Paper 2. For this prompt, answer the following:

1. Write a brief working definition of rhetorical situation. Be sure to use some examples of rhetorical situations to illustrate your point. 
2. Why would knowing how to figure out the rhetorical situations help you succeed as a writer?