My name is Breanne Henshaw and I am a Longwood University, senior Political Science major with two minors, one in History and the other in Rhetoric & Professional Writing. The purpose of this blog is for my Rhetorical Criticism course and it should be used to help better understand how to analyze rhetorical situations. I have taken other courses based around rhetoric, such as Visual Rhetoric and History of Rhetoric during my time in college. Both of these courses have helped me to further understand why rhetors present information the way they do and that everything within a work has meaning or purpose for being there.
This blog should help to provide a better understanding of rhetorical situations and how to analyze them. The rhetorical situation involves five key things and they are: writer, purpose, message, audience, and context. Each of these elements are important in understanding rhetoric and how information can be presented. I will be writing about the different rhetorical perspectives when it comes to the methods in which you can analyze a work, such as a speech.
One of the intended audiences of this blog would be rhetoric students, who may need to see what rhetorical criticism is and how it can be used. This blog should help them to understand the perspectives, such as the Neo-Aristotelian Criticism and others that will be mentioned later in the blog. Another audience would be the professor of my Rhetorical Criticism course, because this blog will help to show that I am understanding the information and coming up with my own concepts as to how rhetorical criticism should be used.