Exigence is the personal driving force of our writing, or what incites us into writing. I usually define it as “why I write” in order to not get it mixed up with purpose. I would also confuse it with Stance at times but the key difference is Exigence asks for a physical reason while Stance asks for an emotional reason. Our exigence does need to be apparent in our writing but it should be weaved into our writing so our audience can see why we are writing to them. This is something I failed to do a lot for my earlier assignments as would I completely neglect to implement my exigence in my writing. This is more harmful than I had originally thought earlier on, since exigence is one of the best tools when trying to be persuasive.

In Figure 1, it is visible that I had a general idea on what exigence was. I was able to point out that my exigence was the fact that students crowding around points of interest on the CCNY campus is a safety hazard. However, I wasn’t able to fully disentangle the purpose of my memo from the exigence.

This entry is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.