Exigence is the last part of rhetorical situation I introduce to students, after speaker and purpose and audience and context. The formal definition is the specific issue, event, or need that directly prompts a speaker to feel the need to speak. Exigence is time sensitive; it captures why now, specifically, is the moment for this text to exist.
After going through notes on exigence, I like to set up a carousel activity: discussion questions about urgency and timeliness posted around the room in stations. One of the questions I always include asks students to think about why memes have such a short lifespan. We still read speeches that are hundreds of years old, but a meme that’s three months old already feels dated. That contrast is a good bridge into a graphic organizer built around a “why does it matter” ladder of analysis: what’s the writer’s claim, what’s the context, and then getting more specific about the time, place, and social expectations surrounding the text.
For a recent example, I used a meme built around a viral moment: a couple caught on a stadium kiss cam having an affair, both executives at the same company, reacting with obviously guilty body language. Someone turned it into a meme playing off a Coldplay lyric, joking that the band hadn’t had a single in years and then made two overnight. Working through it as a class, students identify the text (a joke about the couple’s public downfall), the context (the whole story about the affair and the public reaction), and then dig into time, place, and social expectations: how recent the story needs to be for the meme to still make sense, how public both the original incident and its meme afterlife are, and the extra layer of irony that comes from these being high-powered people at the same company, one of whom may have had to handle office relationship policies for others.
I also have students look for the language of urgency in a text itself; in this meme, a phrase like “last night” signals how recent the event is. After walking through an example together, the notebook writing assignment asks students to find their own short text, a school-appropriate social media post, meme, or local news headline, and answer the same set of questions: what argument is the author making, what’s the exigence, and whether the author chose the best moment to make that argument.
Exigence is the concept students most often confuse with context, so I remind them of the difference: context is everything going on around a text all the time, while exigence is the specific spark of right now. Context is the room; exigence is what lights the match.