Most important concepts of the course

Although we have discussed many important aspects of everyday writing, the most important concepts are exigency, discourse, constraints, audience, and purpose.
Exigence is something that can't be modified. It is an imperfection marked by urgency. We read that Bitzer said that people can't make exigencies, you just have to find them and latch on to them. However, we discussed in class that rhetorical exigencies can be changed through words. It is sometimes easier to figure out what an exigency is by asking "Why did these people write what they did?" In doing this, the most important thing to consider is the audience. Almost all pieces of everyday writing are audience specific and the purpose is directly related to the intended audience. The audience acts as the mediator of change. The audience typically can change the message of the message of a piece based on what discourse community they are from.
Discourse communities are hard to define, but the way I would describe them is a group of people that have a common setting or have similar backgrounds that allow them to be categorized together for a particular reason. Discourse communities are a specific type of audience, but once you understand how to identify them, it is much easier to identify the purpose of the piece of everyday writing.
Another concept that has the ability to change a piece of writing is constraints. Constraints place limits on the way someone writes, how much they write, or when they write. They could be in terms of a physical boundary such as space, or a requirement of certain topics that have to be included.
The concepts of exigency, discourse, constraints, audience, and purpose are imperative to understanding why everyday writing is how it is, and how to understand the pieces of writing.