Rhetoric is Synonymous with Empty Speech & The Rhetorical Situation

The writer of “The Rhetorical Situation” is Lloyd F. Blitzer, who is the Associate Professor of Speech at the University of Wisconsin. His audience was the faculty that attended his public lecture at Cornell University in 1966 and the University of Washington in 1967. He says that for rhetoric to exist in speech, it must be in response to a rhetorical situation. In order to illustrate this, he describes a eulogy about President John F. Kennedy after his assassination, and a eulogy about a fictitious character. Because President JFK was real and his death provided a rhetorical situation, his eulogy had rhetoric. However, since the fictitious character was not real and their death didn’t provide any rhetorical situation in the real world, their eulogy has no rhetoric. The main message of this text is to define what a rhetorical situation is, which is an event that consists of an exigence, an audience, and a set of constraints, in order to show when a piece of speech is rhetoric. The purpose of this piece is to inform others about what makes a piece have rhetoric, and how to define and identify a rhetorical situation.

The writer of “Rhetoric is Synonymous with Empty Speech” is Patricia Roberts-Miller. She is a professor of rhetoric and writing and director of the writing center at the University of Texas. Her audience is other people whose career encompasses writing and rhetoric. She says that rhetoric “is a contingent, pragmatic, and generally verbal way of approaching problems we face as members of communities.” The main idea of her article is that rhetoric, while it may be more dense and more difficult to understand, can explain more effectively and precisely than simpler language can. The purpose of this text is to inform the audience on a few historical views on rhetoric while describing why it is an important concept to know and use.