Jacobson responded to a rhetorical situation posed by recent armed robberies on
her university campus:
It’s easy to feel safe on our familiar campus, but crime is on the rise, and the university is
partly to blame. Poor lighting both on and off campus provides many shadows for crimes
to take place unseen. University police seem more interested in patrolling weekend parties
than making weeknight walks between dorms and the library. And campus shuttle services
are unreliable late at night, forcing students to walk through dangerous, unlit areas.
We need to contact the university administration and let them know that they should take
our safety seriously.
But it’s not just up to the administration. We also need to take our personal safety seriously.
Take self-defense classes. Lock your bikes. Familiarize yourself with the emergency
telephone boxes on campus. Don’t leave valuables in plain sight. Be careful where you
publish your personal identification information. Show the university officials that you are
doing what you can to be safe; then ask them to do what they can.
Katie’s message addressed a particular audience and asked its members to consider
a specific problem and solution. The speech was timely—Katie knew that
the recent robberies would be on her audience members’ minds. The message also
affected how students thought about the problem and how they understood possible
solutions, both those that university administrators could effect and those
that students could implement.
Figure 1.2 shows the four basic factors that determine the success of any rhetorical
situation: the audience, the occasion, the speaker, and the speech itself. Each
of the arrows goes in two directions. That is because each of the factors affects our
understanding of the rhetorical situation, but our understanding of the situation
also affects how we view each of the factors. As we will see, rhetorical situations
both impose constraints and create opportunities.