Major Assignment 1

Assia Watts

Dr. Murdock

English Comp.

Major Assignment 1

Genre, audience, and rhetorical situation work together to create dynamic pieces of literature. Genre is used to give the audience a briefing of what the article might be about or concern. A rhetorical situation occurs when the article describes an issue, and encourages the audience to act on it.

Bitzer describes rhetorical situation by using examples from pieces of literature. Bitzer uses Gettysburg Address, Churchill’s Address, The Declaration of Independence, and John F. Kennedy’s Inaugural Address to address the usage of rhetoric. He also states that each of them indicate a situation, but that does not mean there’s discourse. A rhetorical situation calls for discourse because there needs to be an issue with constraints. Therefore all those pieces don’t have a rhetorical situation.

Though it takes Bitzer a while to reach the main point of what rhetorical situation is, he eventually gets to the point and mentions speeches and settings. He says that persuasion is general, so audiences can be moved by a speech, at any time. He says this to explain that rhetorical situation and persuasive situation aren’t the same. Bitzer then drifts in to how rhetorical discourse must be established early in a story. He uses a metaphor concerning trees and soil to explain.

Bazerman discusses genre. He says they’re standard recognizable forms. Genre is a typification that gives a certain shape and meaning to circumstances . Bazerman states that genre is important to help us understand documents. Because genre is made by a fixed set of features, it doesn’t change from person to person meaning its standardized. Within genre, there’s also genre sets. Genre sets are groups of literature a particular author is likely to write.

Genre also is set by prototypes and archetypes. There’s certain things we expect to see in certain types of movies or books. These archetypes help us define and predict what will happen. When movies or books don’t use the standard expectations for each genre, it sometimes doesn’t do well. Therefore, genre plays an important concerning what people like, want, and expect.

Audience seems to be the broadest concept we’ve learned. There is no particular audience that will read an article, but there is a target audience. Scholarly articles target students researching a particular topic, but other people will read those articles as well for numerous reasons.

We discussed this with the Collins commencement speech. The target audience was the graduating class, but were they the other ones who heard the speech? Parents, teachers, friends, security, and faculty were other members of the the speech. Even the students in this class, have read the speech though we weren’t there. This poses the question of who was the audience, then?

Audience could be anyone, anywhere but the Google definition says audience is the spectators at a public event. I personally believe audience is much broader than that because if that was the only audience, the what am I. Isn’t my professor the audience that I am speaking with in this article? I define audience as a group of people who have read, heard, or saw a specific event including, stories, speeches, and concerts.

All these concepts helped me conclude a theory of writing. My theory of writing is that genre and rhetorical situation are two entities that work together to move the audience. They move the audience in different ways, though.

Rhetorical situation moves the audience to act, but genre moves the audience to read. To elaborate, if you like crime fiction, you will be moved to read or purchase a crime fiction book. One might even be moved to read a review of a crime fiction story. Genre and rhetorical situation have the potential to move the audience emotionally.

Rhetoric uses logos, ethos, and pathos to move people. Emotion, of course pathos, can help move the audience to act on an issue. Genre can move people emotionally, as well. A sad story about losing a loved one could be a memoir, a drama, or, simply, a non fiction. Those types of stories would definitely cause emotional disturbances or movements.

I haven’t thought about how these three things work together until now. This project has caused me to look back at our previous readings and make some conclusions.