Model
Lloyd Bitzer's "The Rhetorical Situation"
Summary
Theory needs to go beyond thinking of rhetoric as craft and begin taking responsibility for producing a principled, conceptually driven understanding of the kind of situation that gives rise to the practical activity of rhetoric. Theory needs to come to grips with the fact that asking after an understanding of rhetorical situation is anything but an idle activity. Indeed, to contemplate the problem of rhetorical discourse is to come full bore upon that which has been ignored by rhetorical theorists: the problem of the rhetorical situation.
