"Rhetorical Situation and Their Constituents"

In Grant-Davie's text, he explored the concepts of exigence, rhetor, audience, and contraints. To define exigenc, one must ask themselves "What is the discourse about?," "Why is the discourse needed?," and "What should the discourse accomplish?" For example, almost immediately after boarding a cruise ship, the crew holds a mandatory meeting to go over saftey procedures on the ship. This discourse is needed so that in case there is an emergency, the passengers will know where the lifejackets and exits are located. It is trying to accomplish a decrease in the level of panic and chaos in case of an emergency, as well as to keep people safe and possibly save lives. As Grant-Davie simply defines it exigence is a "problem or need that can be addressed through communication" (102). A rhetor is someone who creates a rhetorical situation. When Al Gore brought awareness to global warming through his public speeches, he was an example of a rhetor because he was trying to get our country to realize the dangers of what's ahead and what we can do to slow down the process of global warming. Grant-Davie's texts wants us to examine the word "audience" from many different angles. You never just have "one kind" of audience. There is the audience that the writer intends to read the text, anyone who just happens to read it, readers who form a rhetorical situation, and the audience that is suggested by the text itself. Writers or speakers have to understand that even if their work is intended for a certain audience, a different kind of audience could be reading their text (or listening to their speeches). For example, at one point in the movie "The Social Network," the actor portraying Mark Zuckerburgh describes a certain vocalization as a "glottal stop" however, the sound was not a glottal stop. My Phonetics professor showed this clip of the movie to us in class portraying how they got this wrong in the movie. The movie has nothing to do with phonetics, nor does it impact the quality of the movie for almost any viewer, but this is just an example of how little pieces of information that writers of films create are being critqiued by all kinds of audiences, whether they like it or not. Constraints are the articulators way of getting a message across in a way that evokes manipulation of the audience's emotions. For example, if your roommate is driving you somewhere while complaining about how much gas they've been using recently, they are using constraits to try to get you to offer them some money for gas with out directly asking you for gas money.