Rhetorical Analysis: Responding to Situations through Analysis

 In life, there are an infinite number of situations that a person can be forced to deal with and respond to. Dealing with so many different situations requires a person to be able to quickly diagnose and analyze, and appropriately react to these situations. That's where Rhetorical analysis comes in.

 

(http://mbillard.com/stories/2008/12/08/its-only-on-your-copy)

Rhetorical analysis allows people to quickly analyze and react to changing situations. For example, when I was 10, I was invited to go to dinner with my aunt and uncle. I was used to going to informal restaurants such as McDonalds. They took me to a fancy restaurant where I, through rhetorical analysis of the situation, realized that I should behave much more formally in the current situation than I would in the situations I had seen before. At the time I didn’t think much of this, but later I came to realize that I changed my behavior in response to my analysis of a situation.

A good example of how rhetorical analysis affects how people's responses to situations change based on how they analyze the situation is the exercise that was done Monday. The exercise consisted of writing a list of five words to describe yourself for three different audiences; an employer, a date and a roommate. The differences were as follows:
. Almost all of the words used for the employer were impersonal and related to workplace skills.
. The words used for a date were almost all related to how the person handles personal relationships.
. The words used for a roommate were a mix of the previous two; the mix seemed to depend on the person in question.

 These differences are caused by the different situations presented by each perspective audience member. An employer wants to hire someone who will help their company, which means they look for people with useful workplace skills. A date is looking for someone they can connect with, so they want to hear about how what kind of person their potential date is. A roommate is looking for someone they can get along with and who is useful, so they would be interested in both types of information.

The ability people have to analyze and react to different situations helps people to effectively interact with each other. This skill is important to everyday life and begs the question; could people effectively function in the modern world without these skills?