Terms for GWRTC 103 Discourse Community

discourse: communication among a group of people who share a commonality (values, beliefs, goals, interests) and have a common language
rhetoric: study and craft of communicating to a specific audience, with a specific aim in mind
rhetorical situation:  the context that informs a text or discourse; includes audience, purpose and occasion (exigence)
exigence: the relevance and timeliness of a text, what makes the reader/audience care about it
audience: the people who have something to gain from reading a text; we tend to think about audience in terms of a primary or intended audience (these are the people you are thinking about when writing) and a secondary audience (people who may read your work but who you didn't really intend to).

rhetorical reading:  reading a text with an aim of understanding its audience, purpose, and exigence.
rhetorical strategy:  anything a writer does to reach out to an audience or to create a convincing argument
ethos: the credibility of a text or author; authors build ethos by establishing connections to the reader, by presenting him/herself as knowledgeable about the subject, and by being professional in all aspects of communication.
pathos: the capacity of a text to invoke emotions (anger, urgency, sadness, joy, etc).  Authors can create pathos through the use of personal stories, comparative examples, photographs, and diction (word choice), among many other rhetorical strategies.
logos: effective reasoning in a text; writers build logos through research, organization of ideas, establishing relations among ideas (such as cause effect or analogy).
claim:  the thesis of an argumentative text; a claim expresses the writer's opinion about a multi-sided issue and  justifies it by showing why the opinion is important; claims can never be indisputable facts.
so what: the importance of a claim and topic, the reason a reader should care about it; comes from this idea that readers should never read a text and think "So what?  Why should I care about this topic?"