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Rhetorical Situation

Lloyd Bitzer introduced the rhetorical situation in 1968 but the theory has continued to develop. Today, a common version postions the audience, speaker, and message on the triangle points and sets the triangle within the context. When analyzing recruitment websites, this is the version I've used. While I've adjusted the labels a bit, the relationship between each is the same.


The "audience" is the potential applicants that visit the page. They are the actual site visitors rather than the corporation's imagined audience. Ultimately, signification rests with the potential applicants; until they visit the page, the code doesn't load, the site doesn't render: it isn't until the site is visited that it comes into existence. 


The "speaker" is the corporation. While the true authors of the sites are undoutedly devoted web teams of UX architects, graphic designers, and copywriters, these teams are unweildy at best and impossible at worst to use in an analysis without a background narrative of the development process, often privleged as internal information. Thus, flattening the speaker into a singular corporate identity is the most pragmatic approach.


The "message" is the call to action nudges on the page along with the ideology transmitted by the site's rhetorical mythos. This includes both visual and verbal content.


The "context" is all the background information the audience, speaker, and message bring to interaction. This can incude the potential applicants' personal experience with a company, the company's recent news coverage, and the competitors' recruitment rhetoric.


This rhetorical situation framework allows for an analysis of recruitment rhetoric founded on an understanding of persuasion as relational and co-created; it is in the interactions between agents within the context that meaning is made.

Rhetorical Situation
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