Question Response to Promo Girl

Question Response 2: This is in response to Promo Girls question, “The Challenger.”

 

I wonder if we as humans change the rhetoric in response to situations, specifically tragedies, in Order for out conscious beings to comprehend and swallow in the face of tragedies what has occurred? I also wonder if we do the same thing in light of other situations?

 

As discussed by Jeff Philpott’s class discussion on Tuesday, there seems to a very clear connection between rhetoric used and the situation at hand. We as humans all the time change our rhetoric based on the situation. It’s just like in the challengers case, and in any other type of tragedy, let’s say 9/11 for this example, the rhetoric before and after the event had changed drastically. Before 9/11 we didn’t refer to Iraqis or Middle Eastern people in the same way we do now, the news did not report the same way it did before the war began, and why? Because the situation had changed, they had now committed a terrorist attack on us and we had now waged war. When the situation changes the discourse is sure to change as well.

            This can be said for many other situations as well. The whole idea of the “rhetorical situation” is that rhetorical discourse is called into being by the situation. The situation is what helps us apply the appropriate response. Exigency helps us to find the problem that needs to be addressed, the audience is whom we can influence through our discourse, and constraints are the limitations we face n our discourse. All of these occur and all of them are dependent on the situation so that the proper response can be made. I think a current example of this could be the issue of global warming. The problem is that it is definitely affecting our planet, the audience is those who are willing to make the sacrifices needed, and the constraints could be others that deny and argue against the idea of global warming. If the situation were to change, so would the constraints and audience addressed.

            So definitely the answer would be yes to the question of whether other situations create this same kind of change in discourse.  Rhetoric is directly correlated with situation.