Analysis of My Rhetorical Situation

One of the most important parts of creating any type of media is making sure that you know your rhetorical situation. For our first project, the Controversy Postmortem, I have analyzed the rhetorical situation for my project below.

Audience

The main audience for my quick reference guide will be anyone who is interested in my topic, whether they are a peer, a stranger, or a professor who is grading said project. Anyone who is reading this project has likely heard about the very high-profile case of Brittany Maynard, a young woman with terminal brain cancer who moved to Oregon to die with the help of a physician, and may be curious to learn more about the controversy behind the right to die with the assistance of a doctor. I would guess that the age of most readers would be late teens and greater. Someone who has strong religious or moral beliefs about how someone should die may not read this project if it doesn't fit with their belief system or offends them in some way. Someone who does read this article may be someone who is very liberal, in the political and moral sense, as this is a topic that is highly contested right now in many of the more liberal states. 

Purpose

I am writing this article to give unbiased information to an audience that is interested in my topic. I want them to finish reading my quick reference guide and be more educated about the subject, and hopefully be able to be closer to or to reach a decision about which side they are on regarding the controversy. I want to make it clear to my audience that physician assisted death is different that suicide, because I feel like many people don't understand that. I would also like to make sure that my audience knows that not just everyone can walk in and ask to be assisted in dying. Going along with those two things, I would like my audience to understand why someone would want to use this right to die and also why someone might disagree with it. Because the setting for Brittany's case took place in California and caused a change there,I would think that the timing of this story is important because it is something that happened recently and is still fresh in many of our minds. 

Author

As an author, I would like to think that I bring a really good perspective to this topic as I have lived in Oregon for a while now, one of the 5 states where physician-assited death is legal. My parents have friends who work in the medical field, some of whom have actually shared stories about this particular topic. I feel that because I am perhaps a little bit closer to the topic in that way, that I possibly the best person to tell this story. I also want to be a doctor someday myself, so in some ways I'm doing the research out of my own interest as well, which makes me a good choice to present the story of Brittany Maynard and the controversy surrounding her death.

Vintage Roadside. "White Stag. Made in Oregon. Portland, Oregon" 06/30/2008 via flickr. Standard license