# Exigence > The problem, event or need that prompts a piece of writing and makes it urgent now. A canceled bus route is the exigence for a student's speech; the purpose is what she wants done about it. Also known as exigency ## In practice Exigence is the problem, need or occasion that makes a piece of writing necessary right now. A flooded basement is the exigence for a call to the landlord; a new school policy is the exigence for an op-ed; a friend's wedding is the exigence for a toast. Take the exigence away and the writing loses its reason to exist, which is why teachers ask you to name it before you analyze or draft anything. The term comes from rhetoric, the study of how writing and speech persuade. Lloyd Bitzer's 1968 essay "The Rhetorical Situation" defined exigence as "an imperfection marked by urgency": something that is wrong, missing or about to happen, which words can help change. In AP Language and first-year composition, exigence sits beside audience, purpose, speaker and context as one part of the rhetorical situation, the setup a writer responds to. Exigence is not the same as purpose. The exigence is what happened or what is at stake; the purpose is what the writer wants to do about it. Martin Luther King Jr.'s "Letter from Birmingham Jail" has a clear exigence, a published statement by eight clergymen calling his protests "unwise and untimely," and a purpose that answers it: to defend direct action and persuade moderate readers to support it. ## Exigence in a scene where a speech gets rewritten **A student council candidate throws out her first draft** ``` INT. HIGH SCHOOL LIBRARY - DAY MAYA (17) reads her speech from a laptop. Her campaign manager, DEV (17), eats chips and does not look up. MAYA "I believe every student deserves a voice." Good opener, right? DEV Nobody's voting for a belief. They closed the late bus on Monday. Half the track team walks home in the dark now. Maya stops. She deletes the first line and types: "Since Monday, forty of us walk home after dark." MAYA Okay. Now it's about something. ``` Maya's first opener has a purpose, winning votes, but no exigence: nothing has happened that makes "every student deserves a voice" urgent. Dev hands her the exigence, the canceled bus, and the speech changes from a slogan into a response. Her new first line states the problem before it states her case. ## Exigence examples, from everyday to historical Everyday writing shows exigence most plainly. A product recall triggers a company's apology email. A rent increase triggers a tenant's letter. A bad review triggers an owner's reply. In each case you can point to one event and say: without this, nobody would be writing. Famous speeches and essays respond to an exigence too. Lincoln's Gettysburg Address answered the dedication of a cemetery months after the battle. Rachel Carson's Silent Spring answered the spread of pesticides such as DDT. Ronald Reagan's Challenger address answered a disaster that happened hours earlier and that millions of schoolchildren had watched live. The exigence can be a gap rather than a disaster. A writer may respond to a missing explanation (no one has written a clear guide to this law), a common mistake (people keep misusing this word) or a coming date (the vote is next week). Naming the gap is often what makes an essay's opening paragraph strong. ## Exigence in the rhetorical situation: audience, purpose and context The rhetorical situation is the set of things a writer has to account for: who is speaking, who is listening, why now, what they want and what surrounds the moment. Exigence answers "why now?" Audience answers "to whom?" Purpose answers "to do what?" Context answers "under what circumstances?" A full analysis names all of them and shows how they shape each other. Exigence and context overlap but are not identical. Context is the wider [setting](https://www.inkwell.software/glossary/setting), such as the civil rights movement in 1963. Exigence is the specific prompt inside it, the clergymen's statement. When you write about exigence, be as specific as you can: a date, an event, a document, a decision. "Racism" is context; "the April 12 statement in the Birmingham News" is exigence. Some rhetoricians push back on Bitzer. Richard Vatz argued in 1973 that writers create exigence by choosing what to call urgent, rather than simply finding it. Both views are useful on the page. Some prompts exist before you write, but a good opening still has to make the reader feel them. ## How to find the exigence of a text Ask three questions. What happened, or what is happening, just before this text appeared? What does the writer say is wrong, missing or at risk? What would the writer want to be different after the audience reads it? The answer to the first two is usually the exigence; the third is the purpose. Look at the opening and the date. Writers often state their exigence in the first paragraph ("Recently I read your statement…") or signal it with a time word: today, this week, since the decision, last month. If the text gives no date, check where and when it was published; the event it answers is usually nearby. In an AP Language [rhetorical analysis](https://www.inkwell.software/glossary/rhetorical-analysis), put the exigence in your introduction, in one precise sentence: who, what triggered the text and when. Then return to it when you explain a choice. "Because the clergymen called the protests untimely, King spends three paragraphs on why waiting has failed" ties a rhetorical choice to the exigence that caused it. ## Exigence in stories, speeches and scripts Characters need exigence when they speak at length. A [monologue](https://www.inkwell.software/glossary/monologue), a toast, a closing argument or a pep talk lands when the scene first gives the speaker a reason to talk now: a verdict is coming, the team is down at halftime, someone just insulted the bride. Without that pressure, a big speech reads as the writer talking through a character. The same test helps with a scene's opening. If you cannot name what just happened that forces this conversation, the scene may start too early. Check a speech against the scene before it: does the earlier scene supply the event the speech answers? If not, add that event, or cut straight to the moment the speech becomes necessary. ## A five-minute exigence exercise Take a draft introduction and write one sentence above it that begins "This matters now because…". Finish the sentence with a specific event, date or problem, not a general value. If you cannot finish it, the draft has a purpose and no exigence yet; go find the event that makes the topic urgent for your reader. Now rewrite your first line so it states that exigence before your claim, the way Maya's speech moves from "every student deserves a voice" to "since Monday, forty of us walk home after dark." Read both versions aloud. The second usually sounds less impressive and more convincing, which is the point. ## Official sources & context Sources reviewed Nov 5, 2026 - [Lloyd F. Bitzer — The Rhetorical Situation (Philosophy & Rhetoric, 1968)](https://www.jstor.org/stable/40236733) - [Purdue OWL — Elements of rhetorical situations](https://owl.purdue.edu/owl/general_writing/academic_writing/rhetorical_situation/elements_of_rhetorical_situations.html) [Draft it in Canvas](https://www.inkwell.software/canvas) ## Common questions ### What is exigence? Exigence is the problem, event or need that prompts a piece of writing and makes it urgent. It answers the question "why is this being written now?" ### What is an example of exigence? A tenant writes to a landlord because the heat failed in January. The broken heating is the exigence: the specific problem that made the letter necessary at that moment. ### What is the difference between exigence and purpose? Exigence is what prompts the writing, such as an event or a problem. Purpose is what the writer wants to achieve in response, such as persuading readers, explaining an issue or asking for action. ### How do you pronounce exigence? It is usually pronounced EK-si-jens, with the stress on the first syllable. The related word "exigency" means an urgent need or demand, and some writers use the two interchangeably. ### How do you write exigence in a rhetorical analysis? Name it in the introduction in one precise sentence: the event or problem that prompted the text, with a date or detail if you have one. Then refer back to it when you explain why the writer made a particular choice. ### Is exigence the same as context? No. Context is the wider setting around a text, such as its era or movement. Exigence is the specific prompt within that setting, the event or problem the text directly responds to. ### Who came up with exigence? The word is old, but its use in rhetoric comes mainly from Lloyd Bitzer's 1968 essay "The Rhetorical Situation," which described exigence as an imperfection marked by urgency that discourse can help change. ## Related terms - [Ethos, pathos and logos](https://www.inkwell.software/glossary/ethos-pathos-logos): Aristotle's three ways to persuade. Ethos appeals to the speaker's credibility and character, pathos to the audience's emotions, and logos to logic and evidence. Strong arguments, speeches and pitches use all three. - [Rhetorical analysis](https://www.inkwell.software/glossary/rhetorical-analysis): An essay that explains how a text's choices, such as diction, structure, appeals and examples, work to persuade a particular audience. It analyzes how the text works, not whether it is right. - [Author's purpose](https://www.inkwell.software/glossary/authors-purpose): The reason an author writes a text: what they want it to do to the reader. The three main purposes are to persuade, to inform and to entertain, and most texts lead with one. - [Rhetorical question](https://www.inkwell.software/glossary/rhetorical-question): A question asked to make a point or create an effect rather than obtain an answer. In dialogue, it can challenge, persuade or reveal what a character assumes everyone already knows. --- Canonical page: