By Levi Chappell
Writing is a complex thing. We as writers have to create stories or texts that make sense not only to us, but to our readers (audience). The use of a rhetorical triangle involves three points: the writer (you), audience, and text. These three points are the main three points a writer should focus on. Especially when it comes to the new digital age. We as a whole society have advanced to the point where we can read on a small piece of metal with a circuitboard. However, when it comes to this new media, deciphering and decoding information has become slightly more complex. We as writers must understand that information that we write will come out as hazed or blinded in the boundaries of the digital eye. So, by using the rhetorical triangle, we place ourselves in the middle and become all three, or at least converge all three together so we can see them from all three viewpoints.
The triangle specifically shows the struggle that writers go through especially since the audience can’t see their thought and their interpretation can be hazed in ways.
We focus so much on trying to get a message across that we sometimes don’t take our audience into consideration hence why there is this weird boundary push.
Fig. 1
Fig. 1 shows the rhetorical triangle between the writer, audience, and text. From each point you can think of it as a “viewpoint” while looking through this viewpoint, you can see if there is correlation between the three. The writer must do this especially when they have a deep message that they want to get across to their readers. As previously said above, the digital age has somewhat twisted this viewpoint, so seeing it from a clear design can help readers and writers.
…the advent of digital and online literacies has blurred the boundaries between writer and audience significantly: the points of the once-stable rhetorical triangle seem to be twirling and shifting and shading into one another.
-Andrea A. Lungsford
This quote from “Writing Addresses, Invokes, and/or Creates Audiences” by Andrea A. Lungsford tells us that the digital age has started to twist and haze what we believe is the true message. In ways, everything is twisted through the digital eye. Lungsford wants us to understand that this happens frequently and to know that there was a stable ground, that there is a stable ground still here and that we as the reader and writer must overcome it to understand the true message that is within the text we are reading.
Anyone can write!
