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Michael Duquesnel
Professor Lindsey
College Writing
19 September 2019
Rhetorical Analysis

A rhetorical situation is an event of communication between two parties. The different

parts of a rhetorical situation include the rhetor or author, the audience, the constraints on the

communications, and the exigence or reason for which the communication is happening.

Rhetorical situations occur in any piece of communication whether we are aware of it or not.

For this rhetorical analysis, I will be analyzing a script that I wrote for a film project for

my Modern Thought and Literature class back in the Spring of 2018. The script was titled “Can

You Survive a Horror Movie?” and was a horror-comedy about a group of friends who love to

watch horror movies. One of the guys claims that surviving a horror movie would be pretty

simple, so the rest of the group puts him to the test to see if surviving a horror movie is really as

easy as it sounds. The script was around fifteen pages long and was written in a script format,

similar to what they use in Hollywood.

Rhetor

The rhetor for this situation is me. I was tasked with creating a movie for our final

project. This project would represent what I had learned in the class and my ability to put that

into practice. When creating the script for this movie, I pulled on the knowledge of the horror-

comedy genre and took some inspiration from some of my favorites. Movies like Edgar Wright’s

Shaun of the Dead and Wes Craven’s Scream served as some great examples of how to make an

effective horror-comedy. With a few watches of these films, I picked up on enough tropes to

skillfully apply them to my own writing style.

Audience
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The primary audience for this project was the cast and crew who helped in making this

script become reality. The goal of writing this script was to communicate clearly to the actors on

how their characters should be acting and how the scenes should flow. Without any descriptions

and details, the finished film would have turned out clunky and fallen flat as the actors would not

have known what to do. There were also notes about camera angles and shots for the cameraman

so they would understand what the vision of the film looked like.

The secondary audience in which this project was written for was my teacher, Mr.

Bowen, who would be grading the finished movie. Mr. Bowen was a opinionated man who loved

making his voice and perspective known, and usually, that opinion was incredibly negative. He

loved to tell students that their projects were not up to par, which added some sort of narcissistic

enjoyment to grading projects. This would prove to be a daunting task for me, but I would try to

meet his high expectations of well-scripted dialogue, a plot with good continuity, and a

production quality that avoided cheesiness in order to please him.

Constraints

Like all school projects, this one had a specific due date. With that deadline in mind, the

script had to be written quickly, as we could not start filming until the script was written in full.

This led to me as the rhetor to not have enough time to fully flesh out all aspects of the story that

I wished to. Revisions to the script were to be kept to a minimum as there was not an ample

amount of time for them. This would, in the end, have a lasting impact on how the quality of the

finished movie project would turn out.

The overall guidelines for what the finished product should look like was also a

constraint on this project. The video would have to total at least ten minutes in length. This

meant that the script itself had to reach a certain length so that the film would be long enough.
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The film would also have to incorporate aspects of other films from the genre, to show that I, the

rhetor, had a firm understanding of that particular genre. The project also needed to incorporate

the material that we had been discussing in class such as character development and plot

continuity.

Exigence

The reasons for communication between myself and the cast and crew for the project

were to effectively communicate the vision I had for this film in order to receive a good grade on

the final project for class. Without this communication, the entire project would have seemed

scatterbrained and would take a longer amount of time to finish the film. This also would have

landed me with a bad grade in the class which was definitely to be avoided. I wished to give the

cast better ideas for their characters by explaining each of their personalities on paper so they

could have something to refer to during the filming process. Also with the camera angles and

stage directions already written in the script, it would lead to a better understanding for the crew

and would help to streamline the process.

Final Thoughts

This writing experience overall was one of the more fun and creative experiences that I

have done. I thoroughly enjoyed each and every constraint put on me with the specific guidelines

for the project and also trying to impress my audience. As the rhetor, each constraint allowed me

to push myself into becoming a better writer and work on my communication skills through this

rhetorical situation. The exigence motived me to try to produce the best product that I could.

Overall, I ended up with work that I was incredibly proud of.

Reflection
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In this rhetorical analysis paper, I sought to define the different parts of the rhetorical

analysis in an old script that I produced for a high school English class. It was very important for

me to analyze an older piece of my own work as it allowed me to notice the different aspects of

the rhetorical situation that seemed foreign to me at the start. Through analyzing my own work, I

was able to become more familiar with these principles as I dealt with the work that I produced.

It seems that I could use these observational skills again in my future pieces of writing, both

personal and academic. I have had a couple of ideas for books that I may desire to write in the

future and I believe that if I use these principles in the brainstorming process, I would be able to

better understand what I am writing about and why. Exigence I believe would be the most

helpful in this situation because if I write the book without a firm and solid need for

communication then I would never be able to have people actually read the book!

In looking at my writing from the past, I noticed that I focused a lot upon what the

audience was looking for in my writing and not upon what I wanted to convey. Within the

constraints of this project, it makes sense as I was receiving a grade at the end of the day, but I

wish I would have focused more on what I want to get out of the writing. Within the constraints

of the project, I would see the finished product as a success. The script reached a quality that was

not perfect, but one that I was fairly happy with. At the end of the day, I also received a very

good grade on the assignment. Compared to the rest of the class, my finished movie looked and

felt more like a short film. I would love to credit that to the script that I had written beforehand.

Without it, I don’t believe that it would have been as good.

In the future, I will use this knowledge and techniques to become more aware of my own

writing style. If I am aware of each aspect, I will know when my writing is being tainted by a
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constraint or if I am only focused on making the audience happy. I know that knowledge of the

rhetorical situation will help me to become a better writer in the future.