[MUSIC PLAYING] - Rhetoric is the art of effective speaking or writing. Truly artful rhetoric will be carefully calibrated to the situation in which the speaker and the audience interact with each other. So as you start analyzing a text, you can start with the rhetorical situation. Sometimes you will see it called rhetorical occasion or context, but for our purposes, they're basically the same thing. We just call it a rhetorical situation. 

When we talk about rhetorical situation, we are asking ourselves, where does this exchange between author and audience take place? When does it take place? Is it in private, or is it out in public? Is this situation pleasant and open or hostile and closed? In what ways is the author adjusting her message to this situation. 

Only by considering a text and context can we really understand how the speaker and the audience are interacting with each other. Let's imagine a specific rhetorical occasion. The queen of England is writing a letter to her cousin. Here, the queen's intended audience is only one person, a trusted relative. The queen writes her cousin by saying that she hopes she's well, she misses her, and she hopes that they can get together one day soon. 

The rhetorical occasion here is a private letter between two relatives, and for the most part, it's pretty unremarkable. Keep in mind that the queen is-- well, she's still a queen, so she probably isn't going to sign off with YOLO. She is aware that this letter could still end up in a museum in 100 years. Even so, this rhetorical occasion has much lower stakes than her speeches to parliament or any other public speech that she may give. 

Let's keep the same characters, the queen and her cousin, but we can change the rhetorical situation. The occasion is now the 75th birthday of the queen's cousin. The queen is hosting her at Buckingham Palace. The queen delivers a toast to her cousin on her birthday. 

This is a very different occasion from the private letter. Instead of an audience of one, it's an audience of dozens or hundreds of people. Instead of a private written letter, this situation is a public spoken speech. There's a certain expectation about how a toast should be. It should be brief and personal and positive. 

It can be funny or playful, but there are limits to what a queen can say. Literally, everything a queen says and does is filtered through that situation. This is an occasion of a public toast on her cousin's birthday. 

On the AP exam, you need to do more than just describe a rhetorical situation. You need to explain how the situation influences the author's rhetorical choices. As you plan your essay, focusing on the rhetorical occasion will help you best deliver the information that you want to convey. And that is how you score points with the essay graders.