Exigence is a pretty simple concept but is probably the rhetorical element that most people haven’t heard of before this semester. We’ve heard of purpose, we’ve heard of audience, etc, but Ive never heard the word exigence before taking the “writing for engineers” class. When It was first explained I thought it was basically the purpose, which is incorrect. The correct definition of exigence would be the event that prompted your purpose. For example, In the assignment where we did a memo to express an issue on campus, the exigence would be the cause of that issue. I personally wrote about blackboard and cuny first. One of my purposes was for them to make cuny first more optimized and easy to use for students. However, my exigence was that the cuny first website was slow and sometimes unresponsive, and hard to navigate, which caused difficulty for students to navigate and do simple tasks.

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