Rhetorical Situation--Wednesday's Class Discussion

Grant-Davie offers us a complex nuanced discussion of rhetorical situations, building off of other scholars' definitions in an attempt "to offer a more thoroughly developed scheme for analyzing rhetorical situations" (104). And while I don't expect you to be able to understand and use every word of his article (no one could anyway), I do want you to be able to take something useful from his ideas. So, I'd like us to try to develop a good working definition of "rhetorical situation" that's written in our own language that we can continue to use as a class as the semester progresses. The trick is not to oversimplify the ideas, but to try to capture the complexity in a way that means we get this idea and we can apply it to our own daily lives. It might help to begin by thinking about what the key elements of a rhetorical situation are. Then, see if you can provide a beginning definition of "rhetorical situations" by explaining how those elements interact. [Note: There is no correct response to this task, and I'm hoping that reading your peers' responses will help you refine your ideas. Don't be afraid to start with one of your peers' ideas and revise/refine it. It would be really cool if we could see a class definition develop as the discussion progresses:).] [Due: end of day on Wednesday]