Rhetorical Analysis Of Lloyd Bitzer's Thinking In Pictures

Thinking in Pictures expresses Temple Grandin’s emotional struggles she encountered while being autistic. Autism is a condition, present from early childhood, characterized by arduousness in communicating and composing relationships with other people and in utilizing language and abstract concepts. Grandin grew up dealing with the fundamental emotions like happiness, anger, sadness and fear. Fear became her most immensely colossal emotion when going through puberty and her happiness stayed the same no matter her age. Growing up she was bullied so she always lost her temper and she had to learn how to control it. Sadness and depression always had a play in being constantly bullied. She compares her anger to an afternoon thunderstorm.

Thinking in Pictures was written to tell the story of one who struggled deeply in a very paramount situation in today’s society. It was published by Vintage Books, a division of Desultory House, Inc. Grandin gives her squeeze machine credit for enabling her to understand the concepts of munificence and comfort. She utilizes the metaphor of a wild horse who as first will lash out and

withdrawal from touch, but through a homogeneous contraption as a squeeze machine can become desensitized to physically contact. She additionally states “Some people believe that people with autism do not have emotions, but I defiantly do have them.”

William Convino and David Jolliffe, authors of What is Rhetoric, verbally express that Lloyd Bitzer, author of the essay “The Rhetorical Situation”, describes it best.

Bitzer expounds that you must have three elements for a situation to be rhetorical. These elements include an exigence, audience and constraints (Convino and Jolliffe). Exigence is simply a problem that prompts someone to write, usually a problem that causes the writer anger or sadness; something they would change. Bitzer verbalizes that the audience is not just people who read the book for no reason, but people who read the book because they too are concerned about the exigence (Convino and Jolliffe). Our last element to having a rhetorical situation is the constraints. A constraint according to Bitzer are conceptions and notions that the audience may have about the

topic.

While some experiences do elicit emotions from Grandin, each emotion has very concrete recollection. In a sense, her emotions are no different than any other word in her phrenic picture dictionary. She culminates the chapter by briefly discussion what she considered to be the two variants of emotional brain types: emphasizer and systemizer, she is more of a systemizer. Systemizer is arranged according to an organized system; make systematic.

Temple Grandin states that her emotions are simpler than those of most people. She verbally expresses she only understands fear, jubilance, vexation, and dolefulness. Involute relationships she verbalizes are beyond her comprehension mainly because she doesn’t understand how you can go from loving someone to wanting to kill them. She verbalizes that “people with autism desperately need guides to instruct and educate them so they will survive in the social jungle.” She compares how she feels to authentic life situations. Just like when she verbally expresses she gets great gratification out of doing clever things with her mind. She also says that she is missing something, when people see a beautiful sunset they feel the joy and heartwarming sensation but she doesn’t feel anything.