Help

COMM 1110 WRITING ASSIGNMENT

Lloyd Bitzer, in a seminal article written in 1968, defined the “rhetorical situation” as the “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 decision or action as to bring about the significant modification of the exigence” (Bitzer, 1968).

Some elements of the rhetorical situation include the author (or rhetor; who is speaking?), the audience (to whom is the rhetorical artifact addressed?) and the exigence, or situation which calls forth a response.  A more complete explanation can be found in the reading from Barry Brummett’s Rhetoric in Popular Culture, which focuses on describing the rhetorical situation in terms of a “neo-Aristotelian” analysis.

For this assignment, you will identify the elements of the rhetorical situation indicated above for one of the speeches listed in AmericanRhetoric.com in the “Top 100 Speeches” category.  The paper should be between two and three pages in length, should be written in Times New Roman or another easily read font at an appropriate size (12) and with appropriate margins.  If citations are required (and they almost certainly will be for one or more of these elements or the text of the speech itself), they should be in APA or MLA style.

The paper will be due on July 22 at 11:59 p.m.  You should submit it through the dropbox in D2L.    Please note that when uploading into this assignment, the paper should be submitted in a Word-compatible format (do not use .pages).