Bitzer

The author of the text, “The Rhetorical Situation”, is Lloyd Bitzer. He studied rhetoric at Edgewood College in 1962, and later earned his doctorate degree at the University of Iowa. He went on to profess Speech at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. This journal article comes from “Philosophy and Rhetoric”, and was established in 1968. It is an academic journal article published by Penn State University Press that talks about rhetorical theory and ethics. The main audience for this text is Bitzer’s colleagues in the field of rhetoric and philosophy. The text says that “rhetoric is a mode of altering reality, not by the direct application of energy to objects, but by the creation of discourse which changes reality through the mediation of thought and action” (Bitzer 4). Bitzer says rhetoric is highly situational and is the same way we think of morals, as lying can be wrong but not immoral. Bitzer’s main point of the article is to point out how a situation itself generates the rhetorical situation which consists of three components, an exigence, audience, and contraints. The exigence in the reasoning behind words, such as when a world problem arises, an author will speak out about the problem to share his/her ideas. The audience of the rhetorical situation are the listeners that are capable of being impacted or changed in some way. In his words, the “rhetorical audience consists only of those persons who are capable of being influenced by discourse and of being mediators of change” (Bitzer 8). The constraints of the rhetorical situation are the boundaries of the situation, such as the time limit, the way of communication, and the audience. Rhetoric is a situation created by a response to an exigence. Bitzer views rhetoric as things that we do, that creates changes in the material world. The point of this article is to inform others that rhetoric is conditional depending on the situation and circumstances.