You probably know more about writing than you realize, but you may not know how to use that knowledge to accomplish the full range of writing you need to do. You may have been discouraged by assignments that seemed silly and pointless. If so, you probably wondered, “Why?” and when you finished, “So what?” what you sensed was that real writing is done for a real purpose: Someone has a motive for writing—a motive stronger than simply wanting to complete an assignment. There are, as you will see, many motives for writing. Whatever the specific motive may be, however, writers write because they understand that writing is a way to satisfy a purpose that is important to them.

This book takes the position that successful writing begins with having a motive for writing and understanding how that motive can be fulfilled. The ten chapters that follow this introduction discuss a number of these motives and show how various writers have realized them: to interpret information, to evaluate something, to move others, to persuade others, to amuse others and to experiment with form. The final chapter emphasizes writing to understand reading, but the entire book assumes that reading is intimately connected to writing. Recognizing, through reading, the motives of other writers can help you discover your own sense of what you hope to accomplish when you write and so understand the principles likely to help you succeed.

And act of writing involves five elements that together form what is called the rhetorical situation: author, audience, purpose, topic and occasion.

As writers pursue different motives, they emphasize certain elements of the rhetorical situation over others. Recording a memory and exploring experience focus mainly on satisfying the needs of the writer. Moving, persuading and amusing others focus mainly on eliciting an appropriate response from the audience. Although reporting and interpreting information, evaluating something, and writing about reading certainly satisfy the writer’s needs and require the writer to think about the reader’s needs, they all focus to varying degrees on the subject matter or topic. Whatever your emphasis, though, you can seldom lose sight of any of these elements of the rhetorical situation for long.