Questions on Grant-Davie’s “Rhetorical Situations and Their Constituents.”

by David Cajias

QUESTIONS FOR GRANT-DAVIE

Work with the text, reading closely and finding the answers to each one of the questions! Try to answer each one in your own words instead of copying the answers directly from the text!

1. What is exigence?

2. Why does Grant-Davie suggest a further explanation of exigence beyond the question of “why is this discourse needed?”

3. How does Grant-Davie use stasis?

4. Why must the rhetor(s) see their identity as flexible (subject to change in every situation)?

5. Even when there is just one rhetor (author of a text or a speaker), Grant-Davie tells us that we may still have to consider several rhetors at work. Why is this?

6. What types of audience does Grant-Davie ask us to consider? How are they different?

7. Grant-Davie suggests that “the roles of rhetor and audience are dynamic and interdependent” (499). How can you explain this? (In your own words!)

8. How can constraints be seen “more as aids to the rhetor than as handicaps” (499-500)? (In your own words!)

9. How does Grant-Davie define constraints?

10. Why should people care about what rhetorical situations are and what their constituents are? (In your own words!)