🦜 5. Exigence and Hypotheses

Are You Where You Should Be?

This is Module 5: Exigence and Hypotheses, which should be completed between 2/22 - 2/28. If you haven’t completed everything in Module 4, go back and finish all outstanding tasks now. Don’t forget to click on and review each resource in this guide.

Goals and Checklist

• Learn what rhetorical exigence is
• Learn what rhetorical warrants are and where and when to implement them
• Learn to identify the rhetorical exigence you’re responding to
• Develop strategies for responding to the exigence of writing assignments

To help with various access needs, including task identification and separation and advance notice, I’ll include an abbreviated list of tasks at the top of each weekly module. You can check these items off, but your input won’t be saved after you close this window. You remain responsible for checking the Calendar and ensuring that you’re completing everything in a timely fashion.

Refining Your Research Questions

You’ve probably figured out by now that writing college papers requires that you come up with not only sophisticated, complex, and creative ideas, but sophisticated, complex, and creative ways of structuring them. There’s no one-size-fits-all formula that will work for every paper, every time. But there are some things you can think about that will help you consider how to deepen your thinking and structure your research hypotheses.

Let your RQs/RHs direct you. A well-written set of research questions/hypotheses acts like a blueprint for your paper, literally mapping out all the directions your paper will need to take. (This is why your RQs should be as specific as possible — to spare you the time, labor, and page length of having to “travel” in all those directions!)

Keep your RQs/RHs as specific and narrow as possible. As you revise your preliminary research questions for the first draft of your Research Introduction, think about research writing like a game of strategy in which you’re anticipating your reader’s expectations and attempt to live up to what you’ve promised them. Relatedly, this is why your research hypotheses should avoid trying to solve a problem. You can’t cure cancer, fix the water crisis, or remedy staff turnover in nursing in under 20 pages, but if your research introduction promises to do that, that’s what your reader’s going to expect.

A good way to ensure specificity is to ask “what kind?” about every part of your research questions. If your answer to that question is multiple kinds, then you need to narrow your question further. It’s okay to start with common-sense answers before letting your preliminary research guide your narrowing process.

Let’s return to an earlier example: I’m interested in exploring the relationship between being a disabled academic/professor and academic ableism. If I pose the following research hypothesis:

Disabled instructors are under-represented in academia due to the risks of disclosure, a lack of architectural accessibility, and hiring ads that include intense physical labor as a job requirement to stop disabled people from applying.

To make these hypotheses more specific, I should answer each “what kind” question as specifically as possible:

Chronically ill writing instructors, especially those with fibromyalgia, are under-represented in academia because they can’t risk disclosing, artificially lowering their numbers. Disclosing pain as a writing instructor is trivialized due to most people believing chronic pain is always visible and prevents participation in university life, and therefore doubting the instructor’s disability. To receive necessary accommodations, fibromyalgic writing instructors must negotiate access in the writing classroom through strategic disclosure, ergonomic tools, and a pedagogy that responds to any issues posed by pain, fatigue, and brain fog.

I’ve italicized most of the ways that I answered the “what kind?” questions more specifically. Note that the final sentence usually dictates the emphasis of the entire paper: here, readers are likely to expect that all the other issues taken up in this paper will tie into the idea of negotiating access through strategic disclosure, ergonomic tools, and a pedagogy.

🛑 Stop: Practice!

Revisit the research questions/hypotheses you drafted in Module 3 and try asking “what kind?” of every word and phrase, like I demonstrated above. Rewrite your research questions/hypotheses more specifically by (tentatively) answering the “what kind?” questions you pose, referring to your preliminary research to help you formulate your answers.

What Is Exigence?

According to rhetorical theorist Lloyd F. Bitzer, rhetorical situations don’t exist without exigence as their source. Exigence refers to the circumstances that motivate us to speak or write. There’s an urgency that comes with exigence: for instance, if you win an award you thought you weren’t getting, your excitement becomes a driving force — an exigence — for telling people. As in this case, exigence is at the source of any rhetorical situation.

Exigence isn’t just why a topic matters generally, it’s why it matters specifically at this specific place and time and for your specific intended readership. It’s not enough to show readers your argument with logic and evidence; it’s your responsibility to show readers that the exigence makes the argument worth reading to begin with. Inexperienced writers tend to think readers will be just as interested as they are or that the relevance of their research will be self-evident, but this isn’t always the case. It’s the writer’s job to clarify the text’s relevance, right here, right now.

I’ll read your paper regardless of whether you inform me of exigent circumstances, but I notice the difference between papers that just go through the motions and one that identifies why the issue you’re investigating is relevant right now. However, the skill of invoking exigency isn’t just about earning a good grade but about reinforcing the importance of your research, in and out of your discipline and the ENG 201 classroom.

Discovering exigence is a lot like narrowing a subject to a topic, as Mele (2023) puts it:

Management may be your subject, but if your professor assigned you a paper in a Management course and said write about anything, your paper wouldn’t be about management. You would to narrow the subject, say, to arts management or sports management — but even that would be too broad because many people have already written on these areas of your major. Once you start reading what they’ve said about the type of management you’re interested in, your ideas begin to click. That clicking is your exigence bubbling up. Writer A has said this, and Writer B has said that, but neither of them has addressed the ideas clicking in your imagination. You see a gap in the discussion that you can fill. The recognition of this gap is your exigence. Your topic, by necessity, fills the gap: it satisfies your exigence.

After that, you can refine your purpose, identify the best articles to synthesize, and how to use those articles to most impactfully and accurately convey your claims and interpretations.

Mele also observes:

It may be hard to imagine having our own exigence because typically our instructors have already set some parameters — a topic, a purpose, an audience… but our inquiry will lead us to find what we can contribute to the problem at hand. By reading what others have said, we might see there is something missing in the way they have described the problem, or we see a misstep in their reasoning, or their evidence doesn’t hold up that well. It’s likely we will see a gap we feel the need to fill. Maybe we have an alternative solution. Maybe we think the problem should be reframed. Maybe the record needs to be set straight. These types of speculations can help us pin down our exigence.

Reading Assignments Rhetorically

Since Unit 1 Draft 1 is due this week, you should revisit the guidelines for the qualitative research project, on the Assignments page.

The exigence of the qualitative research project is, most obviously, that it’s an assignment you have to complete — by drafting, workshopping, and revising portions of it in each unit — but it also asks you to write for members of your discipline as well as readers outside of your discipline who might (theoretically) stumble on your work through their interest in some part of your research hypothesis. To make sure you’re responding to all these exigencies, you should read the assignment (and all your assignments!) rhetorically.

Long et al. (n.d.) suggest that, in most writing courses, “students are often asked to respond to situations with their own persuasive or creative ingenuity, even though they’re not expected to become experts on the topic. Until they enter high-level or graduate-level courses, students are mostly expected to simulate expertise.” This is partly signaled in the student’s ability to respond to the multiple purposes and exigencies of a writing assignment. The more attuned you are to why you’re being asked to do certain things for the assignment, whether low- or high-stakes, the more your writing will matter to you and others, and the more your writing will improve!

Usually, college writing assignments have an obvious (primary) exigence and hidden (secondary or tertiary) exigence. Here are the exigencies of the qualitative research project:

• Primary: On the surface, the Qualitative Research Project (QRP) asks you to inform audiences about your interpretation of a set of research data and explain why you interpreted it that way, using secondary and primary research to show where your thinking is coming from, and also to persuade your discipline that your thinking is legitimate, by synthesizing research and using WID techniques
• Secondary: The hidden purpose of the assignment is also its most explicit exigence: to demonstrate to your instructor that you’ve learned the course content by putting into practice the various skills that the course modules have taught you, without having to explicitly identify when you’re using those skills. Students should account for the actual context of the writing assignment prompt, which include the learning outcomes for the course and how they’re assessed. The course objectives, and the specific objectives of each QRP unit of drafting. For instance, writing a literature review demonstrates the ability to synthesize research and to read and understand scholarly articles.

On Simulating Authority

In a way, you’re simulating a position of authority — not a student role — even if you haven’t yet earned the credentials. “I read this article and learned this fact” suggests a student writer, whereas “Long et al. argue that students benefit from learning to rhetorically read assignments, as this clarifies the hidden purposes and exigencies of assignments for them” suggests a writer simulating a position of authority on the subject.

Drafting Time!

This week’s module is brief with the intention that you spend more time on revising your research hypotheses and drafting your research introduction. I recommend you review notes from your preliminary research, check the previous modules and the discussion in the #classroom channel on Discord for information that might help you think about how to develop your research hypotheses and construct your Research Introduction draft, and regularly revisit the assignment guidelines.

🛑 Stop: Post Your Unit 1 Draft 1 to Classes!

By 11:59PM on Sat, post your draft of your Research Introduction to the Assignment dropbox on Classes!

Exit Writing

🥳 Congratulations on getting through this chapter! Don’t forget to check the Calendar for the week’s assignments, including your Tue question and Fri answer posts, posting as well as any other assigned writing. Make sure to look ahead to future weeks as well to get a sense of when low- and high-stakes writing for Unit 1 is due.

Reference List for This Week’s Resources