Blog Post 9

The three constituents of Bitzer’s rhetorical situation are exigence, audience, and constraints.

Exigence is the imperfection, urgency, or obstacle at hand that needs to be resolved. This can also be though of as the rhetorical goal. From our discussion in class I think of exigence as the motivation to write or speak or whatever means the author chooses to use to get his point across. For example, when a dangerous situation happens on campus, the police department is urged to make an announcement to the students that these situations may arise at any time and try to persuade the students to take safety precautions.

Audience is described as the mediators of change. I took this to mean that they were the middle ground between the author’s attempt at persuasion and the change (or solution) brought about by the exigence. The audience must be capable of perusing the change and in order to do that they have to be open mined to the topic on hand. In the campus safety example the audience is the student body, but more specifically the audience are those students who live on campus. The audience must be narrowed in order to target a group of people who are 1) open minded to the topic and 2) capable of making a change. Students who live on campus are both interested in campus safety and willing to be more safety conscious in order to bring about change.

Constraints are anything that may get in the way of the author getting his message across to the audience. This may include any factors that exclude people from being members of the audience (anyone not living on campus would be excluded in our example). Constraints can be anything that blocks the author from getting to the targeted audience in an appropriate way.