Riter response

So I hope I'm supposed to make a new post for blogging my response and not commenting to something.

So I didn't actually find Bitzer too terrifying because he was talking about rhetoric, and I've taken an intro to rhetoric course (which is good and people should look into). I find rhetoric itself to be a challenging topic but still felt that Bitzer had some interesting things to say. I actually really liked his examples of the Kennedy assassination and the situation with the men fishing in the boat. The Kennedy assassination in particular helped me to understand his ideas about rhetoric discourse.

I think what he had to say about rhetorical discourse the most interesting. If I understood him correctly he said that rhetorical discourse happens because of events and people respond, not that people create rhetorical discourse and other people respond to it. I have always thought of discourse as something a rheteror creates with purpose to use, not something that is just created from situation in life. The idea of exigence is also interesting, and how it tied into discourse. Obviously almost everything in the world is constrained somehow, but I never thought of the constraints of rhetoric - mostly because actually defining rhetoric seems to be very difficult for me.

While reading this I tried to think of how we would be applying it to class - since I'm guessing that's where we are going with this piece. The most obvious way is that videogames either create their own discourse or else respond to it. I have defiantly seen video games create discourse; for me Mass Effect helped lead me to many questions about my personal ethics while Fallout 3 made me question the ethics of our society. I also considered games when they talked about the difference between the audience and the rhetorical audience, and it made a lot of sense to that players would experience a game differently, and especially be effected by it differently.