The Aristotelian Triangle helps to map out the many different elements that texts and speeches have to address, and to emphasize the essential fact that all rhetoric is situational.
There is one small problem with the Aristotelian Triangle, however: Aristotle himself never talked about triangles. In fact, he didn’t even talk much about the speaker, the audience, and the subject. In his great work Rhetoric he is really more interested in specifying the ways a person appeals to these different elements. How can a speaker use language to make a compelling case and win people to his side? Aritstotle divided his study into three key appeals, or methods of persuasion: Ethos, Pathos, and Logos.