ENGL 106 Unit 2

What is Rhetorical Situation?

Some helpful definitions. Rhetoric is the study of (persuasive) human communication. Persuasion in terms of rhetoric can be as simple as asking someone to turn out the light. Discourse is just an academic way of saying human communication. An author (or rhetor or writer or speaker, as theyre sometimes called) is the person engaging in discourse. The audience is the person (or people) who hears or reads a text. The audience can be a real person or a person that the author imagines reading his text. Exigence is the reason for a specific communication. When you communicate with someone, what are you communicating and why? The what and why define the exigence of that communication. Context is the circumstance in which the discourse takes place. Context can shape or even prompt exigence. Constraints are any external influences (external to author and audience) that may limit or increase an audiences potential to be moved by communication. A rhetorical situation is a particular instance of discourse between an author and an audience based on exigence and shaped by contexts and constraints.

For more information, see the article Rhetorical Situations and Their Constituents by Keith Grant-Davie in Writing About Writing chapter one.