Week 2 Journal

The first thing that is needed to understand the relationship between rhetorical situation and genre is to define those terms. A genre is a category to describe how a literary work is written, usually a style of writing. Such category includes poetry, nonfiction, fiction, bibliography, etc. Of course everyday writing is also such example of different genre. Rhetoric is a way to improve writer’s capability of achieving a certain goal through writing, such as giving an answer to a question or presenting a question in a situation. Bitzer defines a rhetorical situation 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 decision or action as to bring about the significant modification of the exigence”, meaning a situation in which rhetoric is used to resolve an issue. In order for a situation to be rhetorical, the situation must include an issue to be resolved or a problem to be solved, an audience to be heard and be influenced, and a set of constraints which can influence and “constrain” decisions and actions needed to solve the issue. Such constraints include, but not limited to, beliefs, attitudes, documents, facts, traditions, images, interests, and motives. Now the terms are defined, the relationship can be made between the two concepts. A rhetorical situation, in order for it to be resolved successfully, requires a particular genre that fits the three components of the rhetorical situation: issue, audience, and constraints. For example, if a literary work deals with a rhetorical situation in which a political argument is presented to public, then the genre should be persuasive rather than memorial. Our understanding of relationship between genre and rhetorical situation can help us to decide when we need to use everyday writing as a genre to solve such rhetorical situation.