The rhetorical situation that I have chosen to discuss is the situation where the presenter is telling a story that they invented themselves, and they are waiting to receive feedback from the audience, since the presenter is not sure whether the story will invoke the audience they intended. In this case, the audience they want to invoke is the quiet, creative type, who are more open-ended and aren't held back by practicality. But it is up to the quality of the presentation whether this audience will really be invoked. It turns out that because the presenter was very into the story and started screaming out words whenever an exciting section of the story came up, the audience became very rowdy and therefore did not conform to the invoked audience that the presenter was going for. I'll now go into detail about the three reasons why the audience strayed from the type that the presenter was supposed to invoke.
The first reason is the lack of calmness, the lack of a controlling and soothing nature from the presenter. This ingredient is essential to having a quiet, creative audience, and since the presenter did not do this, the audience got very loud and started screaming and yelling and laughing. This set the presenter off, which led into the second reason, who then began to read the story in a very monotone way, and then the audience got sleepy, which is also not part of the audience that the presenter intended to invoke. The final reason is the lack of an open-ended feeling in the presenting process of the story. Unfortunately, the presenter blocked off the audience from asking any questions at all because he thought they were a waste of time. This further contributed to the wrong invoked audience. Overall, it seems that the presenter did not do a very good job of presenting the story, and thus caused the completely wrong audience to be invoked.
The primary insight that can be drawn from this analysis is that the audience invoked is all up to the presenter's choices and how the story is presented. If the presenter does an exceptional job of enforcing creativity among the audience, then the correct audience will be invoked (in this situation, anyway.) But if the presenter goes crazy off the rails and does not do anything to conform to the audience that they are hoping to invoke, then their plans will be hopelessly ruined. The invoked audience vs. the actual audience is very different in most cases, but a very good presenter can make them more similar than these two things normally would be. So the final judgement about which audience is invoked in this rhetorical situation (not in general), is an audience that is very loud, refuses to ask questions, and just screams and laughs. Then, after the presenter gets upset and stops trying to exaggerate their story, the audience will become sleepy and refuse to listen at all.
Overall, the quality of the presentation and the level of emotion coming out from the presenter greatly affects the audience invoked.
Comments