Rhetorical Triangle
These are the three interconnected components of the Rhetorical Triangle
What are speaker, audience, and subject?
The creator or speaker of a message — the person using rhetoric to communicate with an audience
What is a rhetor?
Speaker, Purpose, Audience, Context, Exigence, Choices, Appeals, Tone.
What do the letters in SPACECAT stand for?
Logical appeal: arguments based on evidence, reasoning, facts, statistics, or structured logic.
What is logos?
The rhetor’s word choice (formal/informal, abstract/concrete, positive/negative, etc.).
To show balance and interdependence - each side affects the other two.
Why is the basic rhetorical situation represented in the shape of a triangle?
The role a rhetor adopts when addressing an audience — the constructed identity presented in the text.
What is persona?
The urgent problem, issue, or motivation that prompts a rhetor to speak or write.
Ethical appeal: the credibility, trustworthiness, and authority of the rhetor. Built through expertise, character, or shared values.
What is ethos?
What is the difference between denotation and connotation?
This is represented by the circle around the triangle.
What is context?
The rhetor is the actual person; the persona is how that person chooses to present themselves in a specific rhetorical situation. Persona is shaped by choices in tone, diction, and style.
What is the difference between rhetor and persona?
It reveals the “why now?” of the text — the specific reason or situation that makes the communication necessary, shaping both choices and audience response
Why is knowing the exigence important?
Emotional appeal: language, stories, or imagery designed to move the audience’s emotions, values, or beliefs.
What is pathos?
Tone emerges from diction.
What is text?
This tells the rhetor what the audience's expectations will be.
What is genre?
Very often, there is a primary and secondary one of these
What is audience?
Something that an analyzer of rhetoric should NEVER DO.
What is say "uses pathos"?
What are rhetorically accurate verbs?
This is the fancy name for the triangle that gives a shout out to its creator.
What is the Aristotelian Triad?
What the rhetor chooses and include and leave out about the subject.
What is scope?
Values, attitudes, expectations, who is the best recepient
What should a rhetor consider about their audience?
Tone is about the rhetor's feelings, while pathos is about the audience's emotions.
What is the difference between tone and pathos?
What is "the rhetor uses diction"?