Rhetorical Situation

Blog post #4

Joshua C. Cook English 1001 (006)

Lloyd Bitzer defines rhetorical situation as follows “a natural context of persons, events, objects, relations, and an exigence which strongly invites utterance.”(Bitzer pg.5) Bitzer then provides three key terms that is associated with Rhetorical situation. These terms being exigence, audience, and constraints. Exigence being the catalyst for the situation, audience being whom the rhetoric is directed, and constraints defining the rhetoric.

An example of situational rhetoric would be an article from NBC news. The exigence would be the DHP confiscating vaccines from a clinic in Georgia for administrating them to teachers. The audience is the people that read NBC news or watches their broadcasts. The constraints would be what happened and how the orator wants the audience to act.

How I would define rhetorical situation after reading Bitzer’s essay would be, speech or writing that produces change in a “positive” manner. This relates directly with genre, for genre is “communicative patterns that other people are familiar with, they may recognize more easily what we are saying and trying to accomplish.”(Bazerman pg.316) This definition of genre makes a rhetorical situation a type or style of genre. For the restraints that are imposed on rhetorical situations make them a communicative pattern.

Citation

Bitzer, Lloyd F. Pennsylvania University Press, 1966.

Bazerman, Charles What Writing Does and How It Does It: an Introduction to Analyzing Texts and Textual Practices, Erlbaum, 2009, pp. 316–317. 

Gosk, Stephanie, et al. “Rural Community in Shock after Georgia Raids Clinic Vaccinating Teachers.” NBCNews.com, NBCUniversal News Group, 5 Feb. 2021, http://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/rural-community-shock-after-georgia-raids-clinic-vaccinating-teachers-n1256858.