HOMEWORK 3

In  "Rhetorical Situations and Their Constituents" , an informative yet very dry piece of literature, Grant-Davie tells us about rhetorical situations and the four categories of constituents.  The author defines a rhetorical situation as “the content in which speakers or writers create rhetorical discourse" and later goes on to say it is like a communication to try and persuade someone to do something.  The four categories of constituents are exigence, rhetors, audiences, constraints. Exigence is defined in the text as  “A need or problem that can be addressed through rhetorical discourse." The rhetors are the people who come up with the writing for the situation that can be specific to a general audience, a certain age group, or whoever the ad or situation is directed to.  The audience is who is the target of the rhetors.  They are who the writing was designed to be fed to, so hopefully they take a bite and do whatever the rhetors advertised in their writing.  The constraints are limitations to what is said for a reason.  For example, the author talks about a friend choosing their words carefully, or constraining them to be something like "dang im chilly" instead of "what is this house an igloo? lets get some heat in here!!" to not come off as pushy.  The whole sha-bang comes together in commercials on tv everyday.  Kobe Bryant comes on tv drinking sprite, the audience is the viewer, the rhetors chose to put Kobe in to appeal to the viewers, the exigence now is that the viewer wants sprite, and the owner of sprite wants their money, and the constraints were using Kobe to get the rhetorical message across that sprite is good and you should drink it, instead of bold font and buzzers commercial that just says BUY SPRITE RIGHT NOW. It is useful to us as college students to help us with our writing, make it appeal to people, while still getting a message across or persuade a reader without being too bold.