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The present study attempts to demonstrate that in persuasive journalistic writing, the proportion in the use of superordinate and ancillary rhetorical roles, or nuclei and satellites, adopting the terminology proposed by Rhetorical Structure Theory (Mann and Thompson, 1988), is a viable indicator to assess what kind of relationship the writer sets out to establish with his/her readership. To this aim, a revisited version of Tirkkonen-Condit's method of textual description (1985), specifically created to unravel the inner workings of argumentative texts, was applied for the scrutiny of two comparable corpora of American English and Peninsular Spanish leading articles. Rhetorical relations holding between sentences of each text and text spans were spelled out and then categorised as nuclei and satellites. Findings reveal a tendency for the American English editorials analyzed to be more writer-responsible than Peninsular …