Hurricane Katrina

An example I chose for a rhetorical situation was Hurricane Katrina. In this situation, the exigences, or the problems being attended to, are the people trapped, the flooding, the need for reconstruction, etc. The audience, or the people who could assist in solving this problem, are the different communities surrounding the disaster, volunteers, and most importantly, the government. The final component, the constraints, or factors that keep us from getting the message across, are the lack of national or international response, and the government's mismanagement and lack of leadership in the relief efforts. The most important element in a rhetorical situation would be the constraints, because they are the things that affect the problem most drastically, especially in negative ways. In this example, the constraints are most significant because it shows that in a rhetorical situation like this, it's hard to fix a problem perfectly. Plus, it represents how miscommunication and lack of effort to solve the problem matters greatly. Like any other rhetorical situation, it's hard to have an exigence and an audience without constraints.