What is Rhetoric Really?

To understand rhetoric it is incredibly helpful to first understand exigence. Exigence being the situation that makes the author want to write about and publish their work. To understand the exigence of the text as a reader, try to put yourself in the author’s shoes why an author writes something is usually much deeper than “Because they wanted to.” While it can be that simple, I dare say that any writing has some sort of exigence behind why the writer chose to write the way the way they did. A more obvious example might be someone like Elie Wiesel. The reason he chose to write his book, Night, is rather obvious, he lived through the Holocaust and needed to make sure that no one would ever forget what happened then, and that nothing like it can happen again. Now knowing what exigence is makes it that much easier to understand rhetoric. A Rhetor (the person using rhetoric) has the task of making their audience relate to their rhetorical situation. To use rhetoric well the rhetor must make whatever they are writing or speaking about make sense to their audience, and to do this the rhetor needs to understand their audience and their medium, in using rhetoric you are persuading someone. To use rhetoric correctly everything has to be perfect, the rhetor needs to be convincing and using the correct language for the audience. And the audience plays an equally important role, they need to understand the rhetor and what they are trying to convey. If everything can come together though, rhetoric is a very powerful and one of the most important tools someone can use in writing and through mastering rhetoric a person can master so many other techniques in writing.