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Chapter 6 Adapting to Your Audience 133

cussed in Chapter 2: The classic laws of invention, organization, style, delivery,
and memory.
After the Roman period, the study and practice of rhetoric went into a period
of decline. As Europe plunged into the Middle Ages, the need for a complete
rhetoric was diminished, and human affairs were largely governed by church
dogma. Eventually, rhetoric came to be associated almost entirely with matters
of style. It is also largely from this period that rhetoric came to be associated
with empty words, signifying nothing, as the often heard expression, “that’s just
rhetoric,” suggests.
With the coming of the Enlightenment, rhetoric was rediscovered. There is
not suffi cient space here to chronicle all the theorists who revived rhetoric. Par-
ticularly noteworthy, however, are the trio of Hugh Blair, George Campbell, and
Richard Whately, who wrote in the late 18th- and early 19th-centuries. Blair
concerned himself largely with style. Campbell was a proponent of a type of
psychology emphasizing discrete mental faculties, returning rhetoric to a con-
cern with the audience and pathos. Whately revived the concern with invention.
His treatise on the Elements of Rhetoric gave a new importance to logic and rea-
soning in rhetoric.
By the early 20th-century, departments of speech began to emerge as discrete
entities on college campuses. Theorists again began writing about rhetoric and
rhetorical theory, many of them returning to the subject’s fi fth-century BC roots
in ancient Greece.
Given this rich history, rhetorical scholar Lloyd Bitzer was following well-
established tradition when he sought in 1968 to ground rhetoric in situational
factors. He defi ned a rhetorical situation as “a natural context of persons,
rhetorical situation
events, objects, relations, and an exigence [goal] which strongly invites utter-
A natural context of per-
2
ance.” The elements of that situation include an exigence (goal), an audience,
sons, events, objects, re-
and a set of constraints that set the parameters for the rhetorical response.
lations, and an exigence
Patrick Murphy, Mary Fisher, and Carolyn McCarthy are examples of people
(goal) which strongly
who responded to an exigence (goal) by facing audiences from all backgrounds, invites utterance.
cultures, and ideologies. As we discuss your own speech situations, remember
that your goals and the audiences you speak to are central to preparing just the
right speech. And, as you will discover later in the chapter, there are also factors
that will constrain or limit your choices—everything from how much time you
have to speak to the legal limits of slander and libel. Let’s begin, then, by look-
ing at your goals as a speaker and the specifi c purpose you seek to fulfi ll in any
given speech situation.

Goals and Specifi c Purpose

All too often beginning speakers get ahead of themselves in the planning pro- short-term goals
cess: for example, they start with the challenges an audience poses without fi rst Those ends that we can
considering their own purpose in speaking and the goal they hope to achieve. If reasonably expect to
you have no clear goal to start with, no amount of audience analysis is going to achieve in the near term.
help. We want you to be able to reasonably predict how your audience is likely
long-term goals
to respond to your speech. This begins with deciding on your goal and then se-
Those ends that we can
lecting a specifi c purpose that will make sense in light of the audience you know
hope to achieve only
awaits you and the goal you hope to achieve.
over an extended period
You can have both short-term goals and long-term goals. For exam- of time.
ple, Mary Fisher sought in her speech to have her audience realize that AIDS