Alyssa Franklin 9/14/18 Major Assignment #1 Rough Draft Dr. Sonja Andrus Audience, rhetorical situation and genre all come together to make writing. Audience means the people, considered a group, who watch or listen to performance, movie, public event; people who take in information according to dictionary.cambridge.org. http.//wikipedia.org says that rhetorical situation means context of a rhetorical event that consists of an issue, an audience and a set of constraints. Rhetorical as in rhetoric means the undue of exaggeration or display (www.dictionary.com). Genre means to sort out; category, is what I got from https://www.merriam-webster.com. Now I will be explaining how Gloria Anzaldua, Billy Collins and Lloyd Bitzer how each writer uses genre, handles the rhetorical situation and reaches and audience. Billy Collins uses genre by persuading the audience in his Choate Rosemary Commencement Address called Slowing Down What grabs the audience s attention is when he gives them a list of what he s not going to do. For example I am not going to wave a banner over your heads and deliver a call to action I am not going to ask you to rush bravely into the fray of life (pg. 2 Collins) Collins puts a twist to the commencement speech by telling the audience something completely different then what they were probably expecting. I know I was surprised when I read this I was expecting him to say hurry go to college, get a job, you don t have much time left etc.. the normal things you here when these speeches are given. But instead he tells the audience to slow down, he is delivering a call for slowing
down, I am going to deliver a call for slowing down, for quietness, for stopping woods, even for a kind of creative loafing, for taking a moment to observe (pg.2 Collins) What I think Collins is saying in this quote is that we have all of our lives to get something done, we do not need to rush into things. When I say Collins uses genre to persuade his audience, his audience is a group of high school graduates and also teachers, facility, family members and friends. When Collins wrote the commencement address he had to think about the audience, how to reach out to them. He does that by doing a twist by saying what he s not going to say to them and telling them to slow down. I believe this was a big shock to the teachers and family members I know mostly all of my high school teachers told me to go to college. That you ll need college to get through life. I feel like he really speaks to the audience when he says Don let the turbulence of public life overwhelm the sanctity of your inner life (pg.3 Collins) What he is saying here is don t let how other people are getting through life so fast affect your mind. They might be getting through it fast, but they might miss out on a ton of things, its nice once in a while to sit down and enjoy things in life. Your body needs the break so does your mind. Another thing Collins I believe pulls in the audience by when he brings up gratitude. We should not have to survive major surgery or a near fatal car accident to feel this most elemental (pg. 4 Collins) I do believe this quote makes the audience realize we have everything to be more gracious to. Also with another thing Collins said the gratitude for being alive. There s a good chance no one has ever thought about this until like the quote up there says unless you serve a near fatal car accident, major surgery or a natural disaster. Collins uses rhetorical situation by pulling in the audience in with reality, saying don t rush you ve got plenty of time. How Collins uses rhetorical situation is kind of like how Gloria Anzaldua uses rhetorical situation and audience in her essay How to Tame a Wild Tongue. She talks about real events that has happen to her which is rhetoric then she explains why she tells her experience, to explain the problem which is the
situation. While doing this she also grabs the attention of the readers specifically English teachers, English speaking people and Spanish speaking people. Here are some examples to prove this.. I remember being caught speaking Spanish at recess- that was good for three licks on the knuckles with a sharp ruler. I remember being sent to the corner of the classroom for talking back to the Anglo teacher when all I was trying to do was tell her how to pronounce my name. If you don t like it, go back to Mexico where you belong. (Pg. 77 Anzaldua) and At Pan American University, I and all Chicano students were required to take two speech classes. Their purpose: to ger rid of our accents. Attacks on one s form of expression with the intent to censor are a violation of the First Amendment. (Pg. 77 Anzaldua) These two quotes are what I believe target the audience which is English teachers, professors, and the head of the English department. Anzaldua points out how the teacher punished her for speaking her own language and how she was just trying to teach the teacher how to say her name correctly. For the second one it tells about the English professor and people who work in the English department all try to take her accident away and take away her right as an american citizen. Because of what the English teachers and professors said she writes about how they took away Spanish-speaking Americans self esteem away. Low estimation of self. In childhood we are told that our language s wrong. Repeated attacks on our native tongue diminish our sense of self. (Pg. 81 Anzaldua) Also how its going to carry throughout their lives. Now how I got she targets the Spanish- speaking Americans is from this quote, By the end of this century, Spanish speakers will be comprise the biggest minority group in the United States, a country where students in high schools and colleges are encouraged to take French classes because French is considered more cultured (Pg. 81 Anzaldua). And By the end of this century English, and not Spanish, will be the mother tongue of most Chicanos and Latinos. (Pg. 81 Anzaldua ) I feel like in these quotes she blames the Spanish-speaking for telling people take over them, unlike her when she clearly states if you really
want to hurt me, talk badly about my language, until I can take pride in my language, I cannot take pride in myself. (Pg.81 Anzaldua) Gloria Anzaldua How to Tame a Wild tongue genre in it is to grab in the audience to get English professors attention. Now in Llyod Bitzer s piece Rhetorical Situation his genre was I believe towards us college and high school students due to the fact of the 13 page he brakes down what rhetorical situation. In Anzaldua s piece her perspective is coming from a student, now Bitzer is coming from a professors mind. In Bitzer s reading he explains the meaning of rhetorical situation. As he states in his text rhetorical situation may be defined as a complex of persons, events objects and relations presenting an actual or potential exigence. Which is quoted multiple times. Situation means that it is real and genuine it has an objective and is publicly observable. Rhetorical means when it is capable of positive modification requires discourse or can be assisted by discourse Now before you can get rhetorical situation there s exigence and discourse that makes up rhetorical situation. Exigence is an obstacle like something that needs to be done. Discourse means conversation so you need to have discourse to go into exigence to create situation to go into exigence to create situation. To get a response from the readers/ audience you will need a situation/ genre that is strong and clear dictates the purpose, theme and mater. When you write to be in the mind of the readers/ audience. Bitzer s main purpose was to explain rhetorical situation he did that while also using audience and genre in his text and how you need them to create rhetorical situation. The audience in this is directly towards high school students and college students. In my past experience with genre, audience, and rhetorical situation I have never read in depth about them. It was just always a glimpse over the term and we moved onto something else. I personally never remembered or knew the true definition of these terms until I got to college. Now for my future I definitely see my self going into depth about what I m writing about now I know what these terms mean. Like with genre in the Collins reading, I myself would love to do that, to write about a topic that
everyone thinks is going to go one way and completely change it. While writing this I had no idea where to start. I m not going to lie I procrastinated this essay for a long time. But I do what I always do I got a a piece of notebook paper and printed out the criteria for this project. Wrote down some questions and started writing along the way.