Rhetorical Situation

Audience:Professionals within your discourse community. There's a good chance that I, your instructor, am not a member of that DC, so don't write it to me!

Purpose:To gather credible, professional resources about a current issue that affects your DC, evaluate and choose the most useful ones, and present them in a format that meets the standards of your discipline.

Topic:Choose any current problem, ongoing debate, or controversial question within your academic or professional field (discourse community), which other members of the discipline are currently discussing, and which is also important to you personally. (It's important to choose something you actually care about because you're going to be spending a great deal of time reading, thinking, and writing about it.)

Next, search for and select at least six sourcesthat you can use to analyze and solve the problem. All your sources should be discourse-community appropriate. In other words, you're looking for sources that other experts would recognize as professional and reliable. They do not necessarily have to be "scholarly," but they should not be too "general interest" either. They should be written by and for professionals in your chosen field. (No encyclopedia articles, no textbooks, etc.) Use your rhetorical knowledge of purpose, audience, and context to choose appropriate sources.

NOTE:When selecting your sources, use the BEAM methodto contextualize them within your overall rhetorical purpose. You don't want to just pick stuff at random! You should have a clear idea of what question you are trying to answer and how each source serves your purpose. No more than two of your sources should provide background information on your topic; the other four should explore the arguments within your discourse community and examine possible solutions to the problem you have identified.

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