The Rhetorical Situation
Penn State Program in Writing and Rhetoric
The rhetorical situation is one of the most fundamental and useful concepts we offer our
students in ENGL 015 and ENGL 202. The term was first used by Lloyd Bitzer (1968) in “The
Rhetorical Situation” to refer to all the features of audience, purpose, and exigence that serve
to create a moment suitable for a rhetorical response. The concept itself, however, is a very
ancient one and appears in some form in many earlier treatises, including Aristotle’s Rhetoric
and Cicero’s De Oratore.
Generally speaking, the rhetorical situation can be understood as the circumstances under
which the rhetor writes or speaks, including:
- The nature and disposition of the audience,
- The exigence that impels the writer to enter the conversation,
- The writer’s goal or purpose,
- The medium for production and delivery,
- Whatever else has already been said on the subject, and
- The general state of the world outside the more specific context of the issue at hand.
Nowadays, we would also add the circumstances under which people read or consume
information. What are people trying to accomplish by reading a text? Why are they motivated
to read?
All of these elements work together to determine what kinds of arguments will be effective (or,
in Aristotle’s words, to define “the available means of persuasion”) in a given case.
The concepts of audience and purpose are key for the writing students do in ENGL 015 and
ENGL 202, which in most cases will be the purposive audience-based writing required of citizens
and professionals. For some assignments, we specify the audience and purpose and have
students develop a suitable response (e.g., “Convince a prospective employer in a cover letter
to hire you”). For others, we might assign a particular genre or type of argument (e.g., a
narrative essay) and leave it to the students to develop a suitable situation by defining the
audience, the exigence, the writer’s purpose, and the current state of the conversation in the
field.
Once the context for the project has been established, the rhetorical situation serves as a guide
or heuristic for invention. The student’s developing sense of the rhetorical situation serves as a
basis for deciding a wide range of questions, such as
- What forms or genre to use,
- What kinds of arguments to make,
- What kids of explanations or evidence are needed,
- What to leave out,
- What to emphasize and what to downplay,
- What kind of dictation and syntax to use,
- What terms to define,
- What design elements to use,
- What technology to use for delivery.
Once students are comfortable with a basic definition of the rhetorical situation, we can
complicate the picture by discussing real-world rhetorical situations that are not as fixed as
they may appear in the classroom. While students can expect their professional lives to be filled
with situations that demand specific types of responses, they will also encounter many
circumstances in which an important part of the task of successfully addressing an issue is
finding or creating a forum in which it can be discussed and an audience willing to entertain it.
This reality asks students to move beyond the notion of the writer as the creator of a single text
and to think instead of the writer as a strategist involved in an ongoing campaign which might
need to begin with substantial groundwork to bring the issue to the point of being available for
debate or discussion.
Revised August 2025 by Stuart Selber
