Blog Entry #3: Rhetorical Situation

In the article Bitzer defines rhetorical situation as a complex of persons, events, objects, and relations presenting an actual or potential exigence which can be completely or partially removed if discourse, introduced into the situation, can so constrain human decision or action as to bring about the significant modification of the exigence. He further breaks this down into three constituents which are exigence, audience and constraint, and after reading this article and another about rhetorical situation I’ve come up with my own definition. My definition of rhetorical situation is communicating in way that expresses your circumstance. There’s many examples of this that we see but don’t recognize one being the State of the Union address. Many of us know that the State of the Union address is a speech made by the president to the citizens of America about the state of the union. The audience in this case would be us, Americans, and the problems we face as a country and how the president plans to fix them is the exigence. The constraints in this setting can be a number of things including the diversity of the audience, his ability to effectively communicate his topics comprehensively and if people are knowledgeable of his topics. We see examples of rhetorical situation a lot and it connects to other subjects such as genre. Genre is defined as a category or type of writing, however; in rhetorical situations you communicate to express your circumstance and to do so you need a genre that helps to express that circumstance.