How Does Lloyd Bitzer Create A Rhetorical Situation

Joe Johnson
01/04/18
Writ 1122 Online
Yin & Yang

To begin, it is important to lay out the definition that each Lloyd Bitzer and Richard Vatz give to the rhetorical situation. According to Lloyd Bitzer “Rhetorical situation may be defined as a complex of persons, events, objects, and relations presenting an actual or potential exigence which can be completely or partially removed if discourse, introduced into the situation, can so constrain human decisions or action as to bring about the significant modification of the exigence.” (Bitzer) Put into layman’s terms, Lloyd Bitzer believes that there are three main parts that create a rhetorical situation – Exigence, Audience, and a set of constraints. If all three of these elements are present,

The audience in a rhetorical situation has to be able to do something to fix the urgency. The constraints are the view, ideas, traditions, values, etc. that constrain the outcome of the rhetoric and decide whether the urgency can be fixed. On the other side of the argument is Richard Vatz. In his piece The Myth of the Rhetorical Situation, he states “I would not say ‘rhetoric is situational’ but situations are rhetorical; not ‘… exigence strongly invites utterance,’ but utterance strongly invites exigence, not ‘the situation controls the rhetorical response…’ but the rhetoric controls the situational response; not ‘…rhetorical discourse… does obtain its character-as-rhetorical from the situation which generates it,’ but situations obtain their characters from the rhetoric which surrounds them or creates them.” (Vatz) In that paragraph, Vatz essentially states the opposite of what Bitzer stated. To boil it down there is one main disagreement between Vatz and Bitzer, this is that Bitzer believes that in the rhetorical situation the situation itself holds all of the power. There must be a situation in order for people to react to it. Vatz, on the other hand, believes that in a rhetorical