ABSTRACT
Craig Smith and Scott Lybarger argue that rhetorical situation involves a plurality of exigencies and complex relations between the audience and a rhetorician's interest. Smith and Lybarger emphasize the mutuality of exigence from the positions of rhetorician and audience, reflecting how both elements help to create the sense of problem. Barbara Biesecker's critique points to the way in which various models of rhetorical situation tend to describe rhetoric as a totality of discrete elements: audience, rhetor, exigence, constraints, and text. Margaret Syverson performs one such alternative framework by arguing that writing is a radically distributed act, rather than an isolated act of creation among individual elements. Writing is distributed across a range of processes and encounters: the event of using a keyboard, the encounter of a writing body within a space of dis/comfort, the events of writing in an apathetic/energetic/distant/close group.
