Firek 1

Liza Firek

WRTG 121

Bearden

13 January 2017

Project 1 Rough Draft

The worknet article I chose to read was Richard E Vatzs Myth of the Rhetorical

Situation that was published in 1973.

To begin I will talk about the semantic aspect of the essay. The most obvious term to

know about is rhetoric, especially since it is stated in the title. Rhetoric, the subject of

this whole essay, is the art of persuasive speaking or writing. With that being said we

can conclude that a rhetorical situation is the context of the rhetoric. Other important

terms such as meaning or objective are brought up in this essay. I believe that these

terms appear so much because we are trying to find the meaning of rhetoric. Three

topics that are brought up simultaneously are exigence, audience, and constraints.

Exigence translates to an urgent need or demand. When Vatz speaks about audience in

his piece, he is simply saying to be aware of the audience and how they can defer the

meaning of rhetoric. The final word he spoke about in this section was constraints.

These are all important because they contribute to the meaning of the article.

Throughout the whole piece Vatz talked about context and how all of these terms

affected it.

Looking at the bibliographic details of the piece, you can infer that all of the articles

and essays Vatz used for reference were current when he wrote the piece. There was
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only one article that was not in a 10 year radius and it was Kenneth Burkes

Permanence and Change that was published in 1936. All of the sources were modern

scholarly articles, and that tells me his essay was reputable for the time.

The choric worknet shows that 1973 was a very big year. The most important thing

that I found was that in 1973 Richard Nixon withdrew US troops from Vietnam. Multiple

times in the piece you see Vatz use examples of the Vietnam War, so we can see that

this even influenced the piece. Other mentionable things that happened were the

releases of The Exorcist and Pink Floyds Dark Side of the Moon. Also the case Roe

v. Wade ruled abortion as a constitutional right.

Now I will talk about the affinity worknet Richard E Vatz was fresh in his field when he

wrote the piece, but still had noteworthy experience at that point in his career. Three

years after he wrote this essay he received his Ph.D, in mass communication and

communication studies from the University of Pittsburgh in 1976. Currently Richard E

Vatz is a professor of mass communication and communication studies at Towson

University in Maryland. Towson University is the second largest college in Maryland,

with that being said we can see that their program is no joke. He is currently serving his

41st year and has received many awards during his years teaching there. These

awards include Towson Universitys Presidents Award for Distinguished Service, the

universitys highest honor. In the 2009-2010 school year he won the Towson student

Government Association Faculty Member of the Year and was the first Towson

professor to win that award. He won the 2002 Teacher of the Year Award from the
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student government of Towson, and he has won an additional 4 outstanding teaching

awards, the most of any faculty member at the university.