Every piece of writing comes from a situation: something prompted it, someone wrote it, for an audience, at a time and place, to do something. This unit is about reading that situation, telling a real claim from a plain fact, and building a paragraph that defends a claim with evidence woven into your own sentences.
The rhetorical situation is the exigence, purpose, audience, writer, context and message of a text. The exigence is what prompts the writer to write. The purpose is what the writer hopes to accomplish, and a text can have more than one purpose.
An audience has shared and individual beliefs, values, needs and backgrounds. Writers create texts in a context: a time, place and occasion. Reading those two well explains why a writer makes the choices they do.
Writers convey positions through claims that require a defense, and defend them with evidence and reasoning. Evidence can be facts, anecdotes, analogies, statistics, examples, details, illustrations, expert opinions, personal observations or experiences, testimonies or experiments. An effective claim provokes interest and needs defending; a known fact doesn't.
Writers relate source material to their own argument by embedding quoted, paraphrased or summarized information into their own sentences. A strong paragraph states a claim that needs defending, brings in evidence smoothly, and explains how the evidence supports the claim.