Exigence lloyd bitzer biography
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The Rhetorical Situation
Lloyd Bitzer introduced the idea of the rhetorical situation to explain how speeches are called into existence: they are a response to a problem, but they are limited in the ways they can respond.1 How this works will be explained in the next few paragraphs, but here's a quick example: You are sitting in a Parent-Teacher Association meeting at your child's high school when someone suggests that a particular book should be banned from the school library. If you are opposed to banning books, this suggestion is something you will want to eliminate; the meeting itself, the audience, you, and how you choose to phrase your response all provide resources for and limits on what you can say.
Rhetorical critics have developed the concept further to use the analytic theory as a critical method. If a speech properly uses the resources and constraints of a situation to eliminate the exigence that brought the speech into being, then the speech is judged a fi
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Last semester I worked as an assistant for a few undergraduate rhetoric classes here at SDSU, and a concept I saw the instructor constantly emphasis was the idea of “the rhetorical situation.” I observed the instructor&#;s constant reference to a paradigm of what he described as the author, the audience, and the topic. The instructor explained to his year freshmen rhetoric students that these came tillsammans to form the context of what influences an author attempts to persuade an intended audience of a specific topic, which is what describes as the characteristics of a rhetorical situation. While I never heard of the term before, I immediately understood the basic concept as taught to entering college freshmen. It made me recall when I was a student at the community college first beginning to learn how to do a critical analysis of texts, learning about how arguments are made within the contexts their intended authors made them. The rhetorical situation (as I originally understood it
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&#;Exigence&#; is a term that has recently become common in discussions of rhetoric and composition. It appears in the influential book Writing across Contexts: Transfer, Composition, and Sites of Writing bygd Kathleen Yancey, Liane Robertson, and Kara Taczak as a begrepp for transfer. ERWC has introduced it as a concept in the newest version of the curriculum (ERWC ), and it is used in numerous articles about teaching reading and writing. In this long post inom will outline the history of this concept and the conversation it has provoked over many decades.
Note: If you just want a handful of questions to help your students use this concept, perhaps without using the term itself, skip to the end of this post.
&#;The Rhetorical Situation&#;
&#;Exigence&#; was introduced into the conversation of the discipline of rhetoric and composition by Lloyd Bitzer in his article &#;The Rhetorical Situation&#; published in the inaugural issue of the journal Philosophy and Rhetoric in