Exercise 3: Analysing rhetorical situations

After reading Keith Grant-Davie's article about rhetorical situations, try to apply what you've learned from it to some real-life rhetorical situations. For this assignment, you'll choose some texts and analyze the rhetorical situations that brought about those texts in order to determine the constituents of those situations, as Grant-Davie defines "rhetorical situation."

In a nutshell, you'll choose two texts and identify their exigences, rhetors, audiences, and constraints. It may help to think of this assignment as a continuation of, or companion to, "Identifying Motives, Values, and Appeals" in the previous lesson. You might even choose, as one of your texts, the same text you chose as your second text in that assignment.

Therefore, as with the previous exercise, you might choose your texts from among the following:

• A short YouTube video (such as a Super Bowl commercial)


• A brief news report or editorial


• A post from your favorite blog


• An infographic


• A brief comic strip


• Others (consult with your instructor)

You may choose the format your analysis takes. It is just as appropriate here to make a bulleted list of each constituent as it is to write complete paragraphs for each situation. 

Be sure to include some sort of access to your chosen texts (links, scans, bibliographic information, etc.)

Rubric:

Successful analyses of your chosen texts will include the following traits:

• It identifies the exigences, rhetors, audiences, and constraints for both rhetorical situations. (8 points, or 1 point for each constituent for each situation)


• It includes access to each chosen text. (2 points, or 1 point for each text)