Reasoning
5 What is the Rhetorical Situation?
by Robin Jeffrey and Emilie Zickel
A key component of rhetorical analysis involves thinking carefully about the “rhetorical situation” of a text (see Figure 5.1). You can think of the rhetorical situation as the context or set of circumstances out of which a text arises. Any time anyone is trying to make an argument, one is doing so out of a particular context, one that influences and shapes the argument that is made. When we do a rhetorical analysis, we look carefully at how the rhetorical situation (context) shapes the rhetorical act (the text).
We can understand the concept of a rhetorical situation if we examine it piece by piece, by looking carefully at the rhetorical concepts from which it is built. The philosopher Aristotle organized these concepts as author, audience, setting, purpose, and text. Answering the questions about these rhetorical concepts below will give you a good sense of your text’s rhetorical situation – the starting point for rhetorical analysis.
We will use the example of President Trump’s inaugural address (the text) to sift through these questions about the rhetorical situation (context).
Author or Writer
The “author” of a text is the creator – the person who is communicating in order to try to effect a change in his or her audience. An author doesn’t have to be a single person or a person at all – an author could be an organization. To understand the rhetorical situation of a text, one must examine the identity of the author and his or her background. Ask the following questions:
- What kind of experience or authority does the author have in the subject about which he or she is speaking?
- What values does the author have, either in general or regarding this particular subject?
- How invested is the author in the topic of the text? In other words, what affects the author’s perspective on the topic?
Here’s an example of author analysis for the rhetorical situation using President Trump’s Inaugural Address:
President Trump was a first-term president and someone who had not previously held political office. He did not yet have experience with running the country. He is, however, a wealthy businessman and had a great deal of experience in the business world. His political affiliation is with the Republican party–the conservative political party in America.
Audience
In any text, an author is attempting to engage an audience. Before we can analyze how effectively an author engages an audience, we must spend some time thinking about that audience. An audience is any person or group who is the intended recipient of the text and also the person/people the author is trying to influence. To understand the rhetorical situation of a text, one must examine who the intended audience is by thinking about these things:
- Who is the author addressing? Sometimes this is the hardest question of all. We can get this information of “who is the author addressing” by looking at where an article i