Excerpted from “Exigency: What Makes My Message Indispensable to My Reader” By Quentin Vieregge in Writing Spaces

Overview

This essay defines the word exigency and explains its value as a way of gaining and holding a reader’s interest.

Exigency is defined as not simply explaining why a topic matters generally, but why it should matter specifically at this time and place and for one’s intended readership.

Four different strategies for invoking exigency are given with specific examples from student writing, journalistic writing, and trade books to clarify each strategy. Special attention is given to remind students of their rhetorical context, the interests of their readership, their readers’ predispositions towards the subject matter and thesis (sympathetic, neutral, or antagonistic), and the possibility of connecting their thesis with larger issues, concerns, or values shared by the writer and his or her readers.

“Why is this essay worth my time?”

From an author’s perspective, this question may sound unkind: “Of course, it’s worth your time, because I wrote it and poured over every word.” But there’s nothing more sacred to a reader than his or her own time (just recall the last time you had a paper with a fast approaching deadline and had to sort through a stack of library research). It’s not enough to prove one’s argument with irrefutable logic and overwhelming evidence; it’s your responsibility to hold the reader’s attention long enough for them to consider that evidence and logic.

Inexperienced writers often assume that readers will have as much interest in a text’s subject matter as they do, or they believe that the relevance of the text to the reader will be self-evident, but readers can be impatient, and must be convinced to read an argument before they can be persuaded to accept its thesis. It’s the writer’s job to clarify a text’s relevance.

Rhetoricians sometimes refer to this concept as a text’s exigency, which may be defined as the circumstances and reasons why something matters—not only generally, but specifically at this moment, in this place, for this group of people (presumably one’s readership).

This essay will help you implement strategies to persuade your readers that your text is indispensable and that it cannot be put down, discarded, or be deferred until later.

Exigency in the Classroom

Now you might be thinking that the skill of evoking exigency might be essential for most writers, but not when composing school term papers. After all, you have a captive audience; the instructor must read your paper in order to grade it. She will have to read the entire text, and there’s a good chance she’s already interested in the subject matter. Furthermore, if your topic is chosen for you, then it’s entirely possible you don’t think that it’s an absolutely essential or even pressing subject matter. Why bother, then, to make an argument sound enticing, especially if you may not really care about it anyway?

The answer to that question is two-fold. First, if there are twenty other students in your class writing papers over the exact same topic—or a closely related one—then you need every advantage you can get. Providing your paper with exigency will make the professor all the more eager to read it, which will improve her evaluation of it. Second, teachers will sometimes expect students to write to a more skeptical audience, someone who hypothetically could discard the paper or reject a weak argument, and they grade with this other audience in mind. The instructor will read your paper regardless of whether you provide exigent circumstances, but she will notice the difference between a paper that merely goes through the motions and one that proclaims, “read this because it will affect your understanding of an issue of essential importance.” In a sense, your teacher is assuming a different persona—pretending to be someone else, in this case a skeptical reader—and expects you to do the same. However, the skill of invoking exigency isn’t simply about earning a better grade; it’s about captivating your audience and reinforcing the importance of your message, inside and outside of the classroom.

Strategies for Invoking Exigency in Writing

1. Exigency through the Audience’s Agenda or Concerns

To demonstrate that your paper has exigency, you first need to determine why you’re writing. The immediate answer to this question might be, “because it’s part of my grade,” and though this response is technically correct, it will not inspire stellar writing. Instead, one of the best ways to answer this question is to assume a different persona.

Think of a persona as a mask that you can put on or take off as a writer. It’s a “think of yourself as” rhetorical move. You might think of yourself as a student in one paper, a scholar involved in an ongoing literary discussion in another, or an employee proposing a detailed solution to a corporate problem in another. Once you begin to consider your persona—and your reader’s persona—you can start to form an opinion about why your paper would be important.

Hypothetical Writing Assignments

Imagine that you were assigned to write a research proposal where you had to identify a problem on the campus that you attend and develop a solution to that problem. Your audience for this proposal would be whatever individual or group could effect the change you propose.

Let’s say you decided to write about the lack of healthy food choices on campus. Your preliminary thesis sentence may look something like this: “The office of the dean of students should work with the Food Services Department to provide students with more healthy alternatives to the numerous fast food restaurants established on campus.”

That thesis sentence is clear enough, and a sympathetic reader might even already agree with you in principle: “Sure, I’m in favor of options; who isn’t, especially if they’re healthy.” But simply because your readers agree with your thesis doesn’t guarantee that they will be persuaded that something actually has to be done to effect change or even that they should read the rest of the argument. They might think, “But this is not a pressing issue, and furthermore, it’s not my problem. It should be a long-term goal, so I’ll wait to take a closer look at this proposal.”

To capture your reader’s attention, you should surround that thesis sentence with exigent circumstances that explain why this is an issue that matters here, now, and especially for your reader. This involves understanding and empathizing with them, so that you can connect their values with your agenda.

Questions to ask yourself:

• What type of persona* do I have as a writer? What is it that I care about?
• What type of persona do my readers have? What do they value or find especially interesting? What common assumptions do they have, and do I share any of them? Do I believe any of their assumptions are false? What agenda do they have? What motivates them?
•  What pressing, essential, or surprising issue may I, as a writer, share with my readers?

(*Persona in this sense has to do with your role in a particular situation and how you want to come across in a particular piece of writing. For example, as a writer, you compose texts to your friends differently than you compose an email to professor or employer. We all have roles in our academic or professional lives.)

Go through and methodically answer each of the questions above, perhaps building a table (see below). Focus especially on finding out what matters to your reader on a daily basis, how they define their relationship to the topic you’re writing about.

Sample Introductory Paragraph:

Now that the persona of both the writers and readers has been thoroughly examined, the introduction can be written with an eye towards invoking exigency. The paragraph below represents how the thesis above may be merged with the additional contextual information in order to invoke exigency (get readers to care about what you are writing):

The office of the dean of students at this university claims in its mission statement that it promotes a vibrant learning environment in part by “[collaborating] with institutional partners to address the needs of the student body” (Dean of Students Office). Further- more, the dean wants to “support student learning” in part by “[reducing] barriers to student success” (Dean of Students Office). I applaud the dean’s interest in how the entire campus experience can contribute to a student’s ability to succeed and learn, but not enough has been done to provide students with nutritious options. Secondary schools across the country are beginning to provide junior high and high school kids with healthy meals, and researchers have well established a link between proper nutrition and learning potential. It’s time for higher education to do the same. Therefore, I propose that the office of the dean of students work with the food services department to provide students with more healthy alternatives to the numerous fast food restaurants established on campus. I am convinced that the following proposal will live up to this university’s excellent reputation of improving the daily lives of its students.

This passage demonstrates exigent circumstances by finding relevant research about a correlation between nutrition and learning. But, just as importantly, the student-writer researched the values and motivations of the intended audience, the dean of students. The student-writer matched language from the school’s mission statement with the proposal that students should have more nutritious food options. Instead of the writer imposing an additional responsibility upon the dean’s time and workload, the research proposal is framed as a way of helping the dean achieve his own goals. The tone is laudatory and encouraging: “I applaud the dean’s interest” and “excellent reputation of improving the daily lives of its students.” By answering the questions in table 1, the student has found a way to surprise the dean, showing him an added layer that complicates his mission of improving the learning environment.

2. Exigency Through a Gap in the Research

One of the most common methods for creating exigency (getting readers to care about what you are writing) in academic writing involves “creating a gap in the research,” a well-worn phrase that most professors have heard and used numerous times. The strategy involves finding something new to say that contributes to an ongoing discussion. 

3. Exigency Through Reframing the Subject Matter

Exigency is not always invoked by explaining a gap in the current research; there are times when the best way to demonstrate a topic’s importance is to redefine what the issue is about. You might think of this rhetorical strategy as “reframing” an issue. Writers reframe their subject matter by shifting our understanding of the surrounding context. In other words, it’s a matter of what ideas, words, memories, or beliefs we associate an issue with.

Consider, for instance, an issue that arose in the summer of 2010 in New York City. A national controversy was spurred by plans to build an Islamic cultural center a few blocks away from where the World Trade Center Towers had been located before they were destroyed in the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks (Fisher). These construction plans spurred debate about whether the cultural center was symbolically appropriate and whether it was an embodiment of American values or an insult to those values. Many people questioned whether it was appropriate for the Islamic center—sometimes referred to as the Cordoba house—to be placed near the location of a horrific terroristic attack (Fisher). Since millions of Americans who opposed the Islamic Center may have felt a sense of urgency about stopping its construction, a speech in favor of the center would face a particular challenge. The speech would need to address a skeptical audience, and it would need to convey a sense of exigency about why the completed construction of the Cordoba house was indispensable for America’s future (the precise opposite of the audience’s perspective). New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg made such an argument and crafted exigent circumstances by redefining the context (Bloomberg). Instead of people associating the Cordoba house with “ground zero,” “September 11th,” or religious effrontery, he needed them to associate it with America’s long history of religious tolerance.

These strategies are oftentimes used simultaneously, and you may have noticed that there is some overlap between them. Though they may be nebulous categorizations, they provide a useful tool for providing a sense of urgency to your writing. I have personally found that when I think about exigency, it helps add passion to my writing, and it gives me a voice as a writer. Without exigency, I’m an aimless soul drifting in the dark night without a sail or a strong wind. But exigency brings with it a definition of who I am in the text (my persona), who my readers are (their personas), and the common bonds that connect use together. If you use these techniques it will help to animate your writing and motivate your readers to keep read- ing and carefully consider your argument.

Works Cited

Bloomberg, Michael. “Mayor Bloomberg Discusses the Landmarks Preservation Commission Vote on 45–47 Park Place.” NYC, uploaded by The City of New York, 3 Aug. 2010, https://www1.nyc.gov/office-of-the-mayor/news/337-10/ mayor-bloomberg-the-landmarks-preservation-commission-vote-45-47-park- place#/2

Cope, Wendy. “Lonely Hearts.” An Introduction to Poetry, edited by X. J. Kennedy and Dana Gioia, 13th ed., Longman, 2010, pp. 61.

Downie Jr., Leonard and Michael Schudson. “The Reconstruction of Amer- ican Journalism.” Columbia Journalism Review, vol. 48, no. 4, Nov/Dec 2009, https://archives.cjr.org/reconstruction/the_reconstruction_of_ameri- can.php.

Dean of Students Office. University of South Florida, https://www.usf.edu/student-affairs/dean-of-students/. Accessed 3 June 2019.

Fisher, Max. “Is the Cordoba House Good for America?” The Atlantic, 3 Aug. 2010, https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2010/08/is-the-cordoba-house-good-for-america/344631/. Accessed 8 September 2019.

Friedman, Thomas L. The World is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty-First Cen- tury. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2005.

Johnson, Steven. Everything Bad is Good For You: How Today’s Popular Culture is Actually Making Us Smarter. Riverhead Books, 2005.

Surowiecki, James. The Wisdom of the Crowds: Why the Many are Smarter Than the Few and How Collective Wisdom Shapes Business, Economics, Societies and Nations. Doubleday, 2004.