The Rhetorical Hangout
I’m sure many people like to hang out and spend quality time with friends and I am no exception. There are many things we do that I learned in ap lang that I did not realize we do all the time in the outside world and not just in a class. An example of this would be the rhetorical situation.
The rhetorical situation goes on everywhere. When we hang out with friends and have a conversation with them, theres always an audience, a speaker, and the message that they’re trying to tell us. One day when I was hanging out with a friend, she was talking to me about a guy asking her to homecoming. However, this guy is not her type and hangs out with weird people. In this situation, I’m the audience and my friend is the speaker who is telling her story about how she’s trying to reject the guy.
When I hangout with friends, we usually listen to music or I just listen to music privately and even then, just listening to music is another example of a rhetorical situation. Lets take my favorite song as of now ,“1980s Horror Film II” by Wallows . When I listen to music, I almost always pay attention to the lyrics and one of the reasons why this song is my favorite is because of the lyrics. The song talks about how a guy is hanging out with this girl that he’s really into and he’s about to make a move. However, there’s this plot twist that really made me chuckle when I first heard it and honestly, it still makes me chuckle everytime. My favorite part of the song goes:
“I can’t help the way I feel anymore
And I need to ask you, Jamie:
Oh, can it be that you feel this way, too?
The lights were off
The mood was right
She came and laid with me
I looked into her eyes
Tried to make her mine
But then she said
“I’m really not that into guys.”
Funny right? The reason why I bring this up is because this is another example of the Rhetorical situation. The speaker sings the song in a way that it feels like he’s telling us, the audience, a story. A story about how he falls in love with a girl and in the end gets rejected because of her sexuality.
You could be sitting in a classroom or watching tv and the rhetorical situation would still be happening. It doesn’t matter where you are and who you’re with, it’s happening. In fact, you reading this right now is an example. My point is you may not realize it but the rhetorical situation happens a lot more than you may realize.