Anytime someone offers information, opinions, or remarks then they’re participating in what rhetoricians call a rhetorical situation. This framework helps us to study and understand all of the context and factors that relate to what someone else writes or says at a given moment. Doing so puts us into a better position to evaluate that person’s remarks and respond to them.
The theoretical framework for rhetorical situations was created by Lloyd Bitzer in the 1960s, in response to the overall lack of models to analyze discourse. Until Bitzer’s framework, people relied mainly on the rhetorical triad and the appeals. For Bitzer, this classical orientation didn’t meet the needs of modern audiences where mass communication like radio and television was playing an increasingly important role in persuasion. As a new model, Bitzer proposed the following elements to analyze:
Exigence: A problem or event that serves as the initial motivation for the speaker. Examples might include a shooting, a terror attack, an accident, or impending natural disaster like a hurricane. Bitzer tried to distinguish exigences created by human actors as opposed to inevitable natural events. However, we can’t deny that people often use non-human events as motivation to address other issues.
Audience: Like in the classical model, audience consists of everyone who might encounter the speaker’s message and be persuaded to take a stance or specific action. The audience exists on different levels. The immediate audience includes people the rhetor is speaking or writing to at that given time. However, the message can spread to secondary audiences, like people who see a speech on YouTube or read an article online days later. Tertiary audiences include people who encounter the message months or years later. A rhetor might address one or all of these kinds of audiences, depending on their goals.
Constraints: Certain people, events, objects, or forces can have a powerful influence over what the rhetor says or doesn’t say. For example, a lawyer must follow a set of protocols when presenting a case to a jury. The judge can make decisions on what’s allowed as evidence, and can order statements or testimony stricken from the official record. The judge also gives direct advice to the jury on how to interpret certain events. Although this may have different levels of impact, lawyers always anticipate the judge’s response to their discourse and plan accordingly. Every rhetorical situation can have judges like this, though they don’t always seem apparent.
This basic framework has evolved over time as rhetorical theorists have adapted, questioned, and challenged it. Some theorists have pointed out that rhetorical situations don’t exist by themselves. We construct them to understand and simplify complicated events. Also, theorists have increasingly realized that rhetorical situations don’t occur in a vacuum. They’re not isolated, but usually link together in chains or rhetorical ecologies. One rhetorical situation always responds to others that preceded it.
Still, the original model of the rhetorical situation provides an effective starting place to evaluate and analyze the discourse surrounding an event. You can use it to breakdown any act of communication, from a press release to an op-ed column to an academic article to understand who the author(s) are speaking to, how they’re doing it, and why. You’ll learn things about the piece that didn’t seem obvious at first, and which give you a more in-depth understanding.