Key Terms in "Rhetorical Situations and Their Constituents"

• Rhetorical situations point out influential factors within the broader contexts that help explain why decisions were made and why things turned out the way they did. (pg 264)
• Rhetorical situations help us discover the extent to which the world is not chaotic but ordered, a place where actions follow patterns and things happen for good reasons. (pg 264)
• "Compound" rhetorical situations are discussions of a single subject by multiple rhetors and audiences. (pg 265)
• Rhetorical situations are generally the context in which speakers or writers create rhetorical discourse. (pg 265)
• They are also the situation where a speaker or writer sees a need to change reality and sees that the change may be effected through rhetorical discourse. (pg 265)
• Integrity is the ability to apply a standard set of strategies effectively to any situation the rhetor may face. (pg 265)
• Receptivity is the ability to respond to the conditions and demands of individual situations. (pg 265)
• Rhetorical situations can also be defined as a set of related factors whose interaction creates and controls a discourse. (pg 265)
• Exigence is "an imperfection marked by urgency; it is a defect, an obstacle, something waiting to be done, a thing which is other than it should be". (pg 265)
• A rhetorical exigence is some kind of need or problem that can be addressed and solved through rhetorical discourse. (pg 265)
• Constraints are "persons, events, objects, and relations which are parts of the situation because they have the power to constrain decision and action needed to modify the exigence". (pg 266)
• The stasis theory can be used as an analytic tool, an organizing principle in the sequence of questions that explore the exigence of a situation, but defining the issues of a discourse also involves determining the stases that will be contested in the discourse itself. (pg 266)
• Kairos is the right or opportune time to speak or write. (pg 266)
• An "implied author" or "second self" is the authorial identity that readers can infer from an author's writing. (pg 269)
• Primary and secondary audiences are audiences that are present and those that have yet to form, audiences that act collaboratively or as individuals, audiences about whom the rhetor knows little, or audiences that exist only in the rhetor's mind. (pg 270)
• "Composite" audiences consist of either of several factors or of individuals who each represent several different groups. (pg 270)
• Constraints are persons, events, objects, and relations which are parts of the situation because they have the power to constrain decisions and action needed to modify the exigence. (pg 272)
• Inartistic proofs are beliefs, attitudes, documents, facts, traditions, images, interests, motives and the like. (pg 272)
• Linguistic constraints are imposed by the genre of the text or by the conventions of language use dictated by the situation. (pg 273)
• Dialogue challenges the idea of rhetorical situations having neat boundaries. (pg 274)
• Precedents always create constraints. (pg 276)