Burke’s Pentad
Creative Challenges - academic, Burke's Pentad, clarify, Collaborating, purpose, revision, style, writing process
Use Burke's Pentad to interpret human events, stories, and movies.
In A Grammar of Motives, philosopher and critic Kenneth Burke presents a model for analyzing written and spoken language to better understand and even predict human behavior. His model, the pentad, can be used to understand or interpret human behavior and to develop ideas for stories. The pentad assumes people can have ambiguous, conflicting, and complex reasons for acting. It attempts to avoid simplistic explanations.
