During this project, I learned that most perspectives are not mutually exclusive. Theories that appear unrelated can actually work alongside one another to paint a clearer picture of a rhetorical event. I wouldn’t have realized this had I not been looking to fill the gaps of one perspective with others. I ended up finding fitting material for those gaps from other rhetoricians. I also learned that any one rhetorical event can have countless epistemologies applied to it. It took me ages to plan out my content because I just had so many ideas that could have worked really well, but of course they did not all fit together. Picking which ideas could be nestled into others and which were the strongest was difficult, but I like the simple combination of concepts I ended up with.

 

​Both this paper and my definition of rhetoric focus on Bitzer’s idea of rhetoric altering reality. I found the subjectivity of reality to be very eye-opening, and how Bitzer relates it to the exigence just made sense to me. Writing this paper and analyzing the speech from The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 1 also gave me ideas for my definition. Katniss pointing to the burning building behind her prompted me to include setting in my paragraph about rhetoric.