Persuasion, Audience, and Argument

A writer writes in order to influence readers, to change their beliefs, attitudes, Or behaviors. Readers make judgments about validity and plausibility; they ask questions about impor-tance, relevance, and interest; and they decide whether action is warranted. The authors and readers who interact by way of a written text operate from specific sociohistorical con-texts, contexts that may differ in time, location, and culture. Writing is thus a complex, dynamic, and situated mode of commtmication, and persuasion-the aim to influence-is a dimension of all writing, not a distinct type or genre of discourse that can be separated from "informative " or "expressive " or other supposedly nonpersuasive types. Researchers who seek to understand these dimensions of writing·-the interactions of writer, reader, context, and text-enter the province of rhetoric, the classical art of choosing from among the available means of persuasion. As Kennedy (1998) describes it, rhetoric is "a form of mental and emotional energy " (p. 3) aimed at affecting a situation. Although valuable work on the interactions of readers, writers, and texts has been con-ducted by educational psychologists (see chap. 27, this volume), much of it has been confined to fadors affecting comprehension and recall. In the United States, the rhetorical perspectiv