Rhetorical Situations

When working with rhetoric, we look at the origins of a text. With this, handling a rhetorical situation includes anything surrounding or relating to it. Lloyd Bitzer describes rhetorical situations as “the context in which speakers or writers create rhetorical discourse”. To identify a rhetorical situation, it must be made up of six different parts. These include rhetor, exigence, purpose, audience, constraint, and affordance. When we have a better understanding of the characteristics of a rhetorical situation, we make ourselves a better reader and writer. In Kitterman, Grant, and Adams writing, they mention how the exigence is similar to a starting point for writing. This is where a “problem” starts so that the author can create ideas for their content. A good example that the three writers used of exigence was a dictionary, where we identify that there is a multitude of vocabulary words that are unknown to us, where in that case, the author constructed a response. As mentioned before, rhetor and audience are a main component of rhetorical situations, where the rhetor creates the situation and the audience comes together to find a solution through discussion. Now there are two types of audiences, primary and secondary. Primary audiences receive the situation and are more of the decision makers, while secondary audiences aren’t the ones who are sought out for the solution. Audiences play a big role in rhetorical situations, giving the author their purpose. To conclude, there’s different things that make up a rhetorical situation, and when we analyze writing to identify these characteristics, we grow our knowledge to be better readers and writers.