Rhetorical Sitations

As in, situation governed by rhetoric, not situations that are, in and of themselves, well, you get the idea...

I feel like this was almost a set-up for me, because I spent most of my high school career in carefully structured rhetorical situations. I was a speech kid (not a debater. never a debater), so rhetoric was my thing. I didn't even have a name for it at the time, but everything in those events, from my interactions with my competitors and judges to my carefully paced and plotted speech was a rhetorical gesture.

My signature event was called Original Oratory. In OO, your relative success is entirely dependent on your ability to create a lasting, completely one-sided discourse with your audience (in this case, your judge, because you competitors have heard your speech a dozen times by mid-season and could probably recite it back to you, verbatim). You must convince the judge that, not only do you know everything there is to know about your chosen topic (Sexualization in media, rain-forest destruction, the family units of geese) your topic is of immediate and vital importance to the survival of culture as we know it (to this day I think that goose-family-unit-girl was secretly the god of orators. no other explanation for her success exists).

Your job, in other words, is to create a lasting and meaningful discourse with your judge about the worth and reliability of your information, delivered as emotionally rich as possible so that your budding professional relationship can outlast and defeat the relationship being built by your seven competitors in what is essentially a complex emotional/logical deathmatch. If you win, your judge remembers your topic and/or hair color long enough to place you first. If you lose, you dwindle slowly down the line of placings until you get to last...

Bitzer says that rhetoric is situational. OO is purely situational  because if you take away the context of the situation, you become some yahoo with a soapbox issue that no one wants to listen to. Maybe you have a niche group of activists. Probably not. In your situation, you can construct this facade of reliability by making yourself seem more knowledgeable and confident than you are or ever have been. You construct this fake persona to create your rhetorical situation to convince your judge that you are, in fact, the most talented rhetor in the room, in the competition, perhaps on the planet.

This is probably more than you ever wanted to know about high school speech and debate, but these articles spoke to the seventeen year old in me who learned to play the system before she knew what rhetoric was.