Rhetorical Situations

In "Rhetorical Situations and Their Constituents," the author loosely defines rhetorical situations as events, acitivities, or situations that a rhetor shapes with particular discourse in order to get people to do something. Examples of rhetorical situations are advertisements where certain language and images are used in order to achieve a goal of motivating the reader to buy into the product. The text goes on to explain the four constituents of rhetorical constraints: exigence, rhetors, audiences, constraints. The exigence is more or less the problem or need of the situation. It is the reason that the discourse is necessary. For example in the case of a shoe add using a celebrity to promote the product, the exigence would include the company’s need to sell people the shoe and also the consumers desire/need to get the benefits of the shoe and to relate to the celebrity figure. The rhetor is the person or figure that generates the specific language and communication being used to persuade in the situation.  The audience is more or less self-explanatory. The audience is the person or group that the rhetor is trying to persuade via discourse.  Constraints are the last of the constituents. The constraints of a rhetorical situation are essentially limitations placed on the rhetor that control what can be said and how it can be said in order to achieve persuasion. A compound rhetorical situation occurs when there are multiple situations that relate to one another and combine to form a larger situation.

As college students and writers, it is important to understand rhetorical situations because they are so prevalent in our learning and daily lives. We need to be able to understand rhetoric and the constraints that can be put on a situation in order to become more well-rounded, established writers/readers.