Rhetorical situation

Identifying a rhetorical situation is more complex than it may seem, because first it must be understood what is rhetoric? What is it main purpose? What are its main components? Lloyd F. Bitzer answers these questions in his paper called “the rhetorical situation”.

A rhetorical situation does not show in front of you saying “Hey I’m a rhetoric situation”, before identifying one it must be known it is loaded started by a rhetorical discourse, and rhetorical discourse is highly influences with the situation in which was created, is highly influenced by the person creating this discourse, because it has always the purpose of persuade. So in few words a rhetorical discourse is one that changes the audience with a new discourse based on one particular situation. With knowing what is a rhetoric discourse, a rhetorical situation it’s easy to understand, because it must have a discourse, audience, exigencies and constraints. A rhetorical situation uses language as a tool to persuade.

Once the rhetorical discourse is present, it needs and audience who is able to understand it, because it may certain language that not everybody will, that is why audience is so important. The audience is there to be persuaded, so the speaker must be very well prepared in the topic to support his main idea, and the audience may work as a moderator in this discourse in which persuasion is seek.

Now a discourse and an audience are present, the next thing needed is exigencies. Exigencies are imperfections made by urgencies, so this means these are the things that need to be persuaded, usually exigencies are bad things happening around, like small issues or imperfections in the surrounding, for example an imperfection in MTU would be the waste food in dining halls, this happens when people serve more food than they are going to eat and the remains are just thrown away.

The next thing needed to have a rhetorical situation is a constraint, which are basically restrictions. These restrictions are loaded in the audience and may be an obstacle for the persuasion in progress.  Constraints are not bad; they are just simple loaded in the education or in the routine of the audience. For example if a rhetorical discourse about politics is offered the ideologies of several people in the audience will be a problem for the persuasion. It is due to this that persuasion not always is effective, but thanks to this variety of discourses exist.

A rhetorical situation is more a process than a situation, simplified to it is minimum, a rhetorical situation is a process in which language is used in a certain situation to persuade an audience, it may have exigencies and a group of constraints, which may represent a challenge for the discourse.