This week’s class focus has been Bitzer’s Metatheory. As I often am with new ideas and theories, I’ve been somewhat slow to grasp it and what it means. After looking around a little, I think I’ve found a good place for me to start. I want to take a short look at another blog, to apply some of Bitzer’s Metatheory to it.
Bitzer’s Metatheory has three main points: Exigence, Audience, and Constraints. I want to look closer at the Audience aspect of the blog I’ve chosen. I feel that it’s the most immediately relevant to a reader, and applies best to the blog’s content.
The blog I want to look at is titled “Science is our Home,” and it can be found at https://astrosanjeet.wordpress.com/. It isn’t a professional blog, rather it seems to be the author’s passion project. The focus of the blog is science, particularly focused on astronomy.
Right upon arriving at the blog’s webpage, I felt welcomed by a lack of intimidation. Many science articles use long and verbose language in their texts, leaving many readers to quickly grow bored or intimidated and overlook them. Science is our Home sports short articles in simple language, and adds illustrations to assist the reader with mental imaging. It was apparent immediately that this blog is not professionally managed, but more importantly, it was accessible to the most casual of readers. It explains science in simpler words and shorter articles. Its goal seems to be to share science with many people in a simple and fun way.
The audience of this blog is a wide one, and I would say that anyone who is interested in astronomy would be included in this audience, regardless of how casual or serious their interest may be. For the more serious reader, links are often included so that the reader might learn more about the subject of the short article, in much greater detail. Many articles are also about scientific history, which can help to give a frame to their contents.
Science is our Home does not have a blatant rhetoric, but the aim of the rhetor appears to be to garner and nourish interest in astronomy and physics. The author also takes a fantastic approach at times, meaning there is content that is not exclusively sound science. As Bitzer’s Metatheory states, the rhetor’s appeals shape their audience. Because of their casual approach, the audience the blogger gains will most likely consist of readers with a casual interest in science and history, astronomy, and possibly things such as extraterrestrials.
There is not much of an exigence to be seen in this blog’s content. One could say that it draws attention to space science after NASA’s recent issues, in an attempt to keep human interest in reaching away from our planet. This is not shown to be the rhetor’s intention, but in writing we often find that authorial intent becomes obsolete, and the audience’s perception becomes the most important view on the subject. The author does get some audience response on their posts, and the response seems to largely be reactions to the content shown in the articles, and encouraging the author to continue writing. While this doesn’t particularly show how the writing affects the audience directly, it does prove that the blogger’s rhetoric reaches them and moves them enough to respond. There are occasional comments that become a thread of deeper discussion, obviously started by readers who have a deeper knowledge of the article’s contents, but these are outnumbered by the simpler comments, just as the serious readers are outnumbered by the casual readers.
Science is our Home is a blog that takes a simple approach to rhetoric, and one that is not conscious of rhetoric devices. It has no intention to persuade audiences, no ideal audience to reach, and does not provoke its audience to consider any issue. However, its aim is to convince its audience to agree with the author’s enthusiasm and passion for science and astronomy. It has no ideal audience, but its audience is far wider for that fact.
Over the course of this review, I’ve seen how Bitzer’s Metatheory is highly tailored to rhetoric that has a more persuasive purpose. It is not as focused on analyzing the educational portion of an artifact as much as it is focused on the exigence of the work. This makes it much weaker to use in the analysis of a purely educational work. I don’t find that this invalidates Bitzer’s method at all. It is made for a specific kind of rhetoric, and when used out of its specialty, like all things it loses most of its integrity. I want to thank Sanjeet Patel, the blogger behind Science is our Home, for giving me new insight into the proper use of Bitzer’s Metatheory, and for posting an interesting blog to assess. If you’ve read through this post, give Sanjeet’s blog a look at https://astrosanjeet.wordpress.com/.
Buried Relic 