Response To Blitzer By: Julia Weiss
There are several
quotes that struck me while reading the Blitzer piece, that really helped me with
understanding the context of the piece. First is, “It is the presence of
rhetorical discourse that obviously indicates the presence of rhetorical
situation”. This is true, at any point in time, if you say any one thing to
another, whether that be proving a point or making a random statement. There
is/was something that made you say what you did. Your rhetorical situation;
whether that is an object mind-trigger, that reminded you of something you
wanted to say, or your arguing to prove a point to one of your friends, and
that motivation itself was a trigger. These things all help to represent what
is known as your rhetorical situation. Here is where it gets tricky, it is the
context of your situation that can be misunderstood, or just way off from the
actual situation itself. I feel that just like in Technical Communications, if
you take one thing in the context of one language, directly translate it over
to another, though your words have not actually changed and you translated them
to their exact counterpart from the original, there is a possibility that the
entire context of your content has been mistranslated. Even if you get the
content right, the context may be a complete miss. So, this leads me to my next
quote, “It seems clear that rhetoric is situational” and it is! Rhetoric is
completely situational, depending on your feelings emotions, content, context, encoder,
decoder, even time, setting, and word placement can affect the effect you have
on the target audience, which then leads me to my last train of thoughts. The
three constituents: Audience, Hearers, Readers, Speakers and Listeners, I added
a couple in I felt needed to be in here. So rhetoric is completely dependent on
situation, completely dependent on context, content, and most importantly
interpretation. If you can deliver a message through a rhetorical style best
suited for the situation/occasion, your grand! Being able to look ahead, adjust
in the moment to the type of decoder you have, not only speak, but also listen
back (displaying good character) and respond, you should be golden, and learn
how to use harness the effect of affective rhetoric. An effective rhetor knows how to use the ethos, pathos and logos according to the situation, context, audience and content.
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