Digging Deeper into Rhetoric

   In the last most, I wrote a tad bit about my understanding of rhetoric at the time. Since then, I've learned more about the exigences, rhetors, audiences, and constraints in rhetorical situations or in writing. What if I and a group of people got together to write something or do something else? We'd all be considered the rhetors, right? Would we be just rhetors, or could we be possible part of the audience, too? I'll explain what I think by using an experience that I had. You see, sometimes when I'd write on my other blog, I'd first ask my dad to look over what I had written to see if my grammar was good and if what I had written made sense, etc. After he'd make suggested corrections, I'd look over it and then sometimes would discuss it with him. While in that discussion, I'd need to take time to listen to him talk about my post before I could continue. Sometimes, he had really good ideas of what I could write in order to improve my content. The fact that I had to kick back and listen to his suggestions is a little illustration of how I not only was a rhetor for my post, but I was part of the audience, as well.

     Many things happen throughout every day. These, in fact, are all rhetorical situations. Being aware of these rhetorical events and the constraints that they bring, can help me as a writer by helping me to figure out good times and situations for me to write in.

     Now, I want to take a moment and discuss exigence for a bit. In the book Writing about Writing, Grant-Davie asks the questions on page 510, "How would you define exigence? Why does exigence matter in rhetorical situations? (What difference does it make?)" Well, I'll answer each of these in bullet points.

• From my understanding, exigence is why or how you write something, or how or why a situation occurs.
• Exigence in especially negative rhetorical situation matters because it can help you to understand and a deal with the situation better.
• And if you don't know the exigence....Well, it just may not be the best thing if it was concerning a negative rhetorical situation because you're more likely to repeat it.

     Tia Baheri wrote a post entitled, "Your Ability to Can Even: A Defense of Internet Linguistics." She talks about that, having a well-written work hangs upon the rhetors, audiences, situation, the technology that's used, and how it is used. This article ties right in with the core subject of this unit in that it basically mentions that the rhetorical situations have a huge impact on whether a writing is good or not.

     I think I am getting a much better understanding now of what "rhetoric" or a "rhetorical situation" entail. At the moment, I don't think that there is any area that we covered in this lesson that I am struggling to understand. But, I am sure that I could improve in my comprehension of each aspect of "rhetoric."