Opening Reflection

Lauren Blais

Dr. Kara Taczak 

Writing and Rhetoric 

14 March, 2018

Opening Reflection 

Rhetorical situation is like the air we breathe. We can’t live without it. A piece of writing cannot thrive or does not have a point, without Rhetorical Situations. A short and simple definition is, “… the context of a rhetorical event that consists of an issue, and audience, and a set of constraints” (“Rhetorical Situation”). In class, we read over and over again about rhetorical situation. One quote stood out to me. It said rhetorical situation is, “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 modification of the exigence” (Bitzer). This helped me better understand my writing. To reference this quote and put it into my own words, rhetorical situation is a problem that is effected by people, events, objects and relations. These situations are written differently based on the writers opinion, the audience, and the genre. Rhetorical situation is the reason we write and how we write. 

Audience is the person or group of people that are going to read a piece of writing. The goal is to write towards your audience. For example, if you are writing to someone between the ages of eight and ten, you are not going to use the intense vocabulary you would use to write to a forty-five year old. A good writer would use simpler terms to grab and keep the eight to ten year old reader’s attention. 

Genre can be determined by literary technique, tone, content and length. After reading Russell and Yanez’s writing I said, “scenarios are different genres we have to write in” (“The Life of Lo”). The responses we had to write were different scenarios to a specific situation. We had to write an email to our professor,  a letter to our grandmother and a text to our friend. I told a story, three different ways to fulfill three different genres. I had to write in three different genres because my audience was three very different people with three different literary techniques. 

Works Cited 

Bitzer, Lloyd F. The Rhetorical Situation. Pennsylvania State University Press, 1968.

“Rhetorical situation.” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 30 Nov. 2017, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhetorical_situation.

“The Life of Lo.” The Life of Lo, Lauren Blais, 18 Jan. 2018, laurenblais16.tumblr.com/.