If you are going to analyze a rhetorical situation, Kenneth Burke argues that you must ask five questions: who, why, what, how, when and where. You will not be surprised to discover that these five questions correspond roughly to the five elements of any communication situation.

• Who sends the message?
• Why does the author send a message to his or her audience?
• What is the message?
• How is the message constructed?
• When and where was the message sent?

NOTE that the when and where questions ask about the context of the message. Note also that the how question asks about skills, techniques, resources available to the person sending the message that precede sending the message and are in this sense pretexts.

Burke's concept of the "pentad" is drawn loosely from Aristotle's explanation of change in which he defined four causes of change: efficient, formal, final, and material. Traditionally, analyses ask about the causes or reasons that "explain" the rhetorical situation. Again, not surprisingly, the tradition originating with Aristotle's analysis of ACTION assumes that there are five causes to be examined in the analysis of any event: efficient, formal, final, material, and instrumental. [Note: instrumental causes were added to Aristotle's list of the four main causes of an event.]

• Efficient cause concerns the person who is responsible for the act (event).
• Formal cause concerns the structure or form of the act.
• Final cause concerns the purpose for the act.
• Material cause concerns the substance of the act (the experiential elements that constitute it).
• Instrumental cause concerns techniques used in the act.

In the postmodern era, scholars rarely understand themselves to be able to completely explain actions and they usually describe their analyses as a search for the "conditions" of an action. They look for circumstances in the experience that are necessary for that experience to have taken place. Consider the act of building a house. One can understand that there are at least five necessary conditions:

• Someone must build the house (efficient cause or agent)
• An architectural plan of some sort structures the building (plan, design, or form)
• The person(s) for whom the house is being built (purpose)
• Building materials (the materials from which the house is built)
• Techniques for building (various "agencies" -- hammering, sawing, pouring concrete, and other techniques or "instruments")

Burke's pentad is a method of raising questions for the analysis of texts. He argues that texts should be considered from the point of view of the ACTION of constructing them. Since texts are constructed from symbols (words, images, etc.), Burke views them as SYMBOLIC ACTIONS. To understand a text, especially from a rhetorical perspective, it is useful to study the relations among the five components of any symbolic action: agent, act, purpose, scene, and agency (or technique). Burke's definition of the pentad