Lloyd Bitzer's Model of The Rhetorical Situation

Bitzer credits Aristotle as the first and only rhetorician (prior to 1968 BCE) to properly recognize the significance of situation to the production of rhetoric. Bitzer builds on Aristotle's understanding of situation to create his model [1].

Bitzer's model of the rhetorical situation includes:


 * rhetor - the speaker or writer
 * exigence - a problem or question that sparks rhetoric
 * audience - those who can mediate the problem or help to answer the question
 * constraints - anything that shapes the discourse
 * there are at least four major types of constraint:
 * persons, places, objects, conditions[1]

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