Journal 2

In their respective essays, Edbauer and Bitzer present the reader with two different approaches to analyzing writing. Both Edbauer and Bitzer would assess the reason behind the conception of the rhetoric, and whether the delivery method affectively reaches its intended audience. But they approach this assessment very differently from one another.

For this assignment, I went to my go-to “passing time” website, Vice; the first article that popped up was entitled “Why the Prison Strikes Going On Across America Really Matter.” The article discusses the prison strikes that are currently happening across the United States and why prisoners, and people in general, think that these strikes need to happen—“It’s easy to turn a blind eye to the struggles of people society has branded ‘criminals’ when we haven’t walked in their shoes…But…most incarcerated people will be released one day.”

Bitzer defines a rhetorical situation as “A complex of persons, events, objects, and relations presenting an actual or potential exigence which can be completely or partially removed if discourse, introduced into the situation, can so constrain human decision or action as to bring about the significant modification of the exigence.” From his perspective, my article’s exigence would be unfair treatment of prison inmates. Vice’s audience is typically a younger, more left-leaning crowd who would most likely agree with the article’s author’s desire to reform the prison system from the “modern-day slavery” in the prison system the author writes about. This exigence should make the reader feel a sense of urgency, which is why Bitzer believes rhetoric is, to an extent, always persuasive.


Edbauer would most likely interpret this article much differently because she believes that the relationship between the article and the reader is very individualistic, indeed too individualistic to define specific constraints for. Each person who reads this article, according to Edbauer, will have a different opinion about the article and the article will affect each reader in a different way. To Edbauer, the consequences of our prison system affect many more people than just those who are imprisoned, and the aftermath of these consequences are what she believes creates the continuing rhetoric on the topic.