Before entering this class, I have never heard of exigence used in any context before. I had no idea what it meant or how it connected to the rhetorical situation. It took me until the lab report to really understand exigence and how it effects my writing, as I was able to use my personal experience of cycling in New York City, to give me real motivation to write my report about bike lanes.

Exigence is the issue or situation that motivates you to write. This can be any sort of problem that you wish to be solved. For example, my groups exigence in our engineering proposal was seeing the statistics of animals lost in the Australian bushfires. Millions of animals have been killed and that made us feel like we needed to do something to help them.

At the beginning of the year, I would sometimes get confused between exigence and purpose since they are quite similar. However, by our final project, I was able to clearly distinguish between the two. Exigence is different because it is solely the reason behind why you chose to write, while purpose is the outcome you are trying to achieve by writing.

Figure 1. Engineering Proposals Reflection Paper Where I spoke About Exigence