Actions Following Patterns

Of the hundreds, maybe thousands of rhetorical situations I encounter on a daily basis, it is incredibly hard to think of just one. For some reason it's the situations that involve conflict that seem to stick out in my memory. So maybe I'll just take a mundane sort of situation and see what happens. The exigence of this particular situation was that my boss wanted to know how my project was going at work. In fact, it's going less than optimally. I suppose he created this situation, but, as Grant-Davie points out, he was not wholly responsible. I suppose I was also a part of the exigence. Otherwise he would not have asked me.

We were each other's audience, but there happened to be another person in the room - our general manager. However, his role was strictly informational and sporadic at best. He was dealing with other things while he was in the room. I suppose there was also another indirect audience member - that of an investor in our company. His participation in these kinds of rhetorical situations is often fuzzy to me. But I suppose he would want to know from my boss what the status of my project is as well. On the other hand, Bitzer points out, the general manager might not have actually been rhetorical, because "the rhetorical audience must be capable of serving as mediator of the change which the discourse functions to produce" (8). As far as I have observed so far, the only way he has been involved in my project so far has been to take credit for the things I've done right. ;)

Now, obviously there are constraints that have already been placed on this situation. He is my boss. I am his employee. And we have a history of about six years in which we've both probably learned how to interact with each other in a meaningful way. For my part, I knew that saying "we're behind and I need more money" was probably not the best way to start out the conversation. But ultimately my goals were to communicate that message to him. I didn't want to hide the fact that we were behind. Nor did I want to leave the conversation without expressing the fact that I need more resources in order to have the project succeed. I started out comparing sales from my particular division with previous sales. In essence, I put the project into context for him. But putting my project into context involves using a lot of technical (internet-type) terminology that he just doesn't understand. So I brought in visual aids - namely that of Google, which probably helped to reinforce my ethos a bit as well as helped him to "get it" a little bit better. In many cases, I seemed to be pointing out a lot of the constraints I encountered in the project. So in a way, they kind of paralleled some of my rhetorical constraints.

I never thought about it this way, but Bitzer also points out that "one cannot say that the rhetorical situation is simply a response of the speaker to the demands or expectations of an audience" (9) because I too wanted to have this conversation. I needed to have this conversation in order to get the resources I needed.