Purpose

The Why.

The Purpose is the Why of any rhetorical piece. It has do with what the rhetoric wants to persuade his audience into thinking or doing. If you want to talk a reluctant friend into going for a run with you, that’s your Purpose: to get her to run with you. 

You might hear your teacher describe Purpose in a different way. For one thing, Exigence might enter the picture. Exigence can help you determine the purpose. Or that term might just confuse you. (It confuses a lot of people, including rhetoricians.) Here’s our take: Exigence has to do with the Need. Purpose has to do with the Why. 

For example, Abraham Lincoln gave his Second Inaugural Address right after the Civil War came to an end. There was a desperate need to bring the two bitterly divided regions together. That need was the Exigence of the speech.

And the Purpose? To get his audience to want to come together.

When Tania is teaching the Purpose of a particular speech, she often finds that students fail to push the purpose far enough. They remain stuck at the surface level. To get down to the rhetor’s deeper purpose, you want to try and get out of your own head and into his head, seeing the argument through his eyes.

Watch Childish Gambino’s music video, “This Is America.” You could say that the song serves to criticize America’s treatment of Black people, and you wouldn’t be wrong. But that’s a surface-level interpretation. Drill deeper. Take in the video’s portrayal of social media. Look at the cars and try to interpret the strangely contradictory glamor towards the end. Get a clue from the two students dancing in a particular way. Note the school uniforms, reflective of those worn in South Africa during Apartheid. What is Childish Gambino’s purpose here? 

Take in all those details and include them in your analysis of Purpose. Your answer will be way more interesting than the boring, simplistic “The purpose is to make people feel bad about America’s treatment of black people.”

Plus, your score will go up.

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