Students are often told to “consider their audience” or to “consider the rhetorical situation” when writing, but with the rapid development of generative AI tools and large language models like ChatGPT, writers may wonder how AI can assist them in adopting an appropriate rhetorical stance. This article explores how writers can use AI as a collaborative partner to analyze rhetorical situations, make informed choices about tone and style, and develop strategies that reflect their purpose and audience. Whether you’re working on a persuasive essay, a reflection paper, or a multimodal presentation, understanding how to interact with AI tools can help you adopt the most
effective rhetorical stance for your task.

What Is Rhetorical Stance?

Your rhetorical stance is the position you take as a writer in relation to your audience, your purpose, and your subject matter. It’s not just what you say—but how you say it and who you are while saying it. It’s how you present yourself in writing: Are you an expert? A student? A concerned citizen? A peer? Are you authoritative? Curious? Humorous? Neutral? Passionate?

Think of rhetorical stance as your writerly persona: Adopting an appropriate rhetorical stance means aligning your tone, voice, and style with the needs of your audience and the goals of your assignment. This is especially important in academic writing, where expectations about formality, evidence, and clarity vary depending on the discipline, audience, and genre.

Three Key Components of Rhetorical Stance

1. Voice – What kind of presence do you create as a writer?
   a. Are you objective and analytical? First-person and reflective? Confident and assertive?
2. Tone – What emotional attitude comes through in your writing?
   • Is your tone enthusiastic, skeptical, respectful, playful, urgent, or neutral?
   • Attitude Toward Subject and Audience – How do you position yourself in relation to what you’re writing about and who will read it?
   • Are you explaining, persuading, questioning, or challenging?

Related Concepts

1. Rhetorical Stance
   • Code Switching
   • Persona
   • Point of View
     • First-Person Point of View
     • Second-Person Point of View
     • Third-Person Point of View
   • Tone
   • Voice
     • How to Develop an Effective Voice, Tone, and Persona

How Can AI Help?

AI can be a valuable thought partner when you’re working through your rhetorical stance. You can use it to experiment with different tones, simulate different audience perspectives, or revise a draft to better match your goals. Using AI ethically, as you will see in the examples below, typically means revising material that you have drafted, rather than asking AI to draft material on your behalf.

Let’s say you’re writing a proposal for a campus sustainability initiative. Try prompting the AI like this:

“Rewrite this paragraph with a more persuasive tone aimed at fellow students who don’t think climate action is urgent. Make it sound like it’s coming from a peer who cares but doesn’t want to lecture them.”

Or, if you’re writing a technical report for an engineering class:

“Make this explanation of the drone design more formal and professional. Assume the audience is my professor and classmates who are also familiar with the terminology.”

These kinds of prompts encourage you to reflect on how rhetorical stance works—and then use AI to try out different versions until you find one that feels right.

Quick Tip: Use AI as a Mirror

Sometimes you can simply ask the AI:

“What kind of rhetorical stance does this paragraph suggest?”

or

“What kind of tone and audience do you think this sounds like it’s written for?”

This can help you diagnose mismatches between what you intended and how your writing actually comes across.

Analyzing the Rhetorical Situation with AI

Before you start writing—or before you start prompting—you need to understand the rhetorical situation: the set of circumstances that shapes any act of communication. Whether you’re composing a formal research paper, a blog post, or a script for a class presentation, the rhetorical situation helps you make purposeful choices about content,
structure, and style.

Before you prompt ChatGPT or another AI tool, take a moment to analyze your rhetorical situation:

• Exigence: What has prompted this writing? Is there a problem to solve, a question to answer, or a conversation to join?
• Audience: Who is reading, watching, or listening? What do they know? What do they value?
• Constraints: What expectations, rules, deadlines, or genre conventions affect your choices?
• Rhetor: Who are you as the writer or speaker in this situation? How do you wantto be perceived?
• Purpose: What do you hope to accomplish—inform, persuade, entertain, reflect, or something else?
• Medium: What form or platform will you use—an essay, a slide deck, a social media post?
• Context: What broader social, historical, or cultural factors might shape how your audience understands your message?

Understanding these elements allows you to adopt a rhetorical stance that aligns with the situation and enables you to use AI more intentionally. When writers understand these elements, they can make more strategic decisions. For example, if you know your audience is unfamiliar with a topic, you’ll define your terms more clearly. If your purpose is to persuade, your tone might be more urgent or passionate. You can also use AI to analyze the rhetorical situation.

For instance, you might ask,

“I’m writing a research paper for a first-year comp class. The topic is food insecurity on college campuses. Can you help me outline the rhetorical situation?”

You might get a response like:

• Exigence: Growing awareness of student hunger
• Audience: Classmates and instructor, likely unfamiliar with statistics or local resources
• Purpose: Inform and possibly persuade them that campus food insecurity is a real issue
• Tone/Style: Academic, but accessible

AI won’t always get every detail right—but it can help you generate options, reflect on your goals, and clarify your choices. You are still the rhetor—the person responsible for the message.

Human in the Loop / Machine in the Loop: Collaborating with AI, Not Replacing Yourself

In AI-supported writing, you’ll often hear two metaphors: “human in the loop” and “machine in the loop.” Both describe ways of sharing tasks between the writer and the AI—but with very different implications for agency and authorship. Researchers

Ranade, Saravia, and Johri (2024) argue that using prompt engineering to analyze the rhetorical situation advances a human in the loop (HITL) approach that “integrat[es] agency and writer-centric methods to AI writing tools.”

Human in the Loop (HITL)

In this model, the human remains in control of the process. AI might offer suggestions, generate drafts, or answer questions, but the human evaluates, revises, and decides. Think of AI as a writing assistant. You’re the writer.
This is the ideal model for student writers using generative AI: you’re the primary
creator, and AI supports your thinking and drafting.

Example Use Cases:

• Ask AI to help brainstorm three angles on a topic.
• Use AI to revise your paragraph with a different tone.
• Feed it your outline and ask how the ideas might be reordered for better flow.

In all these cases, you initiate the task, you assess the results, and you make the final decisions.

Machine in the Loop (MITL)

In this model, the machine takes the lead, and the human merely checks or tweaks the results. This approach can be risky for student writers because it often results in:

• Generic or inaccurate content.
• Poor alignment with assignment expectations.
• Loss of personal voice or rhetorical awareness.

Think of this as letting AI write for you, and then lightly editing the output. It’s tempting, especially when you’re short on time—but it bypasses the learning and decision-making that make writing meaningful.

Why Human in the Loop Matters

In college writing, your instructors aren’t just evaluating the final product—they’re
interested in your process, your thinking, and your growth as a communicator. When
you stay in the loop:

• You improve your rhetorical decision-making.
• You ensure the writing reflects your voice and values.
• You develop critical skills you’ll need in academic, professional, and civic contexts.

Use AI to Share the Load, Not Hand It Off

As Knowles (2024) explains through the framework of Rhetorical Load Sharing, discussed further below, AI can assist with various parts of the rhetorical process (invention, arrangement, style, etc.)—but effective collaboration means knowing which parts you want help with and why.

AI can carry some of the load, but you’re still driving the car.

When you intentionally engage with AI—rather than just passively accepting whatever it generates—you strengthen both your writing and your learning.

Who’s Driving the Writing Process?

As you start using generative AI tools like ChatGPT to support your writing, it’s important to think about how you’re using them—and whether you’re staying in the
driver’s seat. This graphic compares two different approaches: Human in the Loop, where you remain an active, thoughtful writer, and Machine in the Loop, where AI takes
over more of the process.

Use this comparison to reflect on your own writing habits and make sure you’re using AI to enhance your rhetorical thinking—not replace it.

Using the Rhetorical Canons to Guide AI Support

The classical canons of rhetoric—invention, arrangement, style, memory, and delivery—offer a time-tested framework for navigating each phase of writing. Knowles (2024) proposes Rhetorical Load Sharing (RLS), a framework that identifies how AI can assist writers without replacing their agency. Below are examples of how AI can share the rhetorical load at each stage.

Invention: Generating Ideas and Getting Started

• Rhetorical Task: Brainstorming, researching, prewriting.
• Human Role: You have an idea but aren’t sure how to start.
• AI Help: Brainstorming, outlining, exploring angles, identifying sources.
• Example Prompt: “Help me brainstorm possible arguments for an essay on renewable energy for a college audience.”

Arrangement: Organizing Your Ideas Effectively

• Rhetorical Task: Structuring your essay, creating transitions, developing cohesion.
• Human Role: You’ve written something, but it feels disorganized.
• AI Help: Suggesting structures, reordering paragraphs, generating transitions.
• Example Prompt: “Here’s my rough draft. Can you suggest how to reorder the paragraphs so my argument builds more logically for a general academic audience?”

Style: Adopting the Right Tone and Voice

• Rhetorical Task: Adjusting sentence structure, tone, word choice, and register.
• Human Role: You need your writing to sound more formal, conversational, or engaging.
• AI Help: Adjusting tone, simplifying language, varying sentence structure.
• Example Prompt: “Rewrite this paragraph in a more formal tone for a research paper.”

Memory: Checking Facts and Refining Claims

• Rhetorical Task: Verifying content, summarizing sources, avoiding misinformation.
• Human Role: You’re unsure whether your claims are accurate or citations are correct.
• AI Help: Fact-checking or summarizing sources you provide.
• Example Prompt: “Here’s a paragraph summarizing this article. Is anything unclear or inaccurate?”
• Important Note: AI is not always accurate—fact-check AI-generated content using credible sources. Ensure you can access any sources AI suggests to confirm accuracy and verify they exist, as AI may hallucinate sources.

Delivery: Adapting for Audience and Platform

• Rhetorical Task: Selecting the appropriate medium and formatting your message for clarity and impact.
• Human Role: You want to publish or present your writing effectively.
• AI Help: Formatting for digital platforms, turning essays into slide decks or scripts.
• Example Prompt: “Turn this blog post into a short script for a TikTok video.”

Prompt Engineering: Get What You Need from AI

Just like in conversation, the quality of your question determines the quality of the response. To maximize AI tools, learn prompt engineering basics.

• Prompt Tips:
  • Include the rhetorical situation (audience, purpose, genre).
  • Be clear about the type of help needed (brainstorming, rewriting, outlining, etc.).
  • Set the tone: “Use a casual tone for a general audience,” or “Make this suitable for an academic essay.”
  • Provide examples or models when possible.
  • Ask follow-up questions to refine output.
• Example of Prompt Revision:
  • Basic Prompt: “Help me with my thesis.”
  • Improved Prompt: “I’m writing an argumentative essay for a first-year composition class. My topic is social media and mental health. My audience is college students and instructors. Can you help me write a strong thesis statement that clearly presents my argument and stakes? My argument is that social media can negatively impact mental health but can also be used to find supportive groups to improve mental health.”

Checklist: Are You Still in the Loop?

Use this checklist to reflect on your process. Answering “yes” to most questions indicates you’re maintaining agency while using AI.

• I defined my audience, purpose, and genre before using AI.
• I used AI to explore ideas—not to write the whole thing for me.
• I reviewed and revised AI-generated text critically.
• I checked for factual accuracy, missing context, and bias.
• I ensured the final draft reflects my voice and rhetorical choices.
• I understand how I got from idea to final draft and could explain it.
• I learned something from the process of using AI.

If most answers are “no,” revisit your process to make more intentional choices about AI as a writing partner.

Final Thoughts: You Are the Author

Generative AI tools are powerful but only as effective as the person using them. To use AI ethically and effectively, understand your rhetorical goals and make intentional decisions about AI’s role. AI can assist with thinking but cannot think for you; it can aid writing but cannot write in your unique voice. Treat AI as a tool to develop ideas, reflect on rhetorical choices, and revise effectively. It won’t automatically improve your writing, but critical and ethical engagement can enhance your learning.

By sharing the rhetorical load with AI, you can become a more confident, strategic, and ethical writer—using AI to support, not replace, your creativity and agency.