The Rhetorical Situation

Bitzer, oh Bitzer, oh how you've made me read this piece four times. Aside from my lack of ability to understand documents written in 1966, The Rhetorical Situation actually helped better my understanding of the business side of web design (and other industries as well). Before I go into why I thought this paper was rewarding and interesting, I would like to have the reader think of what they would do if they were a business owner. Would they trust someone to design a website for them (or even do any sort of job for them, in that matter) if they had no experience or knowledge of what they would be working on? Would they hire, for instance, a contractor to build a house for a million dollars who never attended a class on architecture? That's one expensive pile of wood, if you ask me.

So, getting back to Bitzer. He posed a strong theory that I thought was extremely true and useful to know for college students soon entering the corporate roll: "Every audience at any moment is capable of being changed in some way by speech..." The ability to persuade is one of the most vital traits that anyone in the corporate world can have. It is what separates those who succeed from those who have a degree and are still making $20k a year thinking that they can be handed a career after going through college. I'd hate to use the example of politicians for this, but I believe that it fits best. A politician is perhaps one of the most successful corporate entities that exists today. The majority of us watched the presidential debates last year. Fact checkers showed that almost one-third of the time, the statistics that the candidates were referencing were completely wrong, but did Americans notice? No, because their confidence while rattling off those statistics made us to believe that they knew what they were talking about.

As someone hoping to enter the world of web development in the near future, I have learned that the ability to persuade employers that you can offer them a product that no one else can is key to guaranteeing a job. If a company comes to me and asks if I can do something - for instance, creating a website with a database coded in PHP that can hold up to 2,000 orders at a time - I wouldn't tell them that I couldn't do it. If I did not know exactly how to get the job done, but I knew that I could find out, I would be confident in speaking to the clients and leading them to believe that I was educated enough for the job.