Writing Takes Place in Context

Just as in spoken conversations, written conversations are affected by the contexts — or settings — in which they take place.

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Physical, social, disciplinary, and cultural contexts affect the writing and reading of documents.

For students, one of the most important social and cultural contexts shaping their written work is academic life itself, that complex mix of instructors, fellow students, classes, tests, labs, and writing assignments that they negotiate on a daily basis. Academic culture — and U.S. and Canadian academic culture in particular — is the product of hundreds of years of arguments, decisions, revisions, and reinventions of a way of thinking and behaving. Academic culture affects far more than how you behave in class, although that’s certainly an important element of it. It also shapes the writing you’ll do during and after your time in college.

In nearly every instance, what you say and how you say it will reflect a combination of contexts. For example, the fact that Mia’s posts were both written and read online allowed her to link directly to other digital documents, such as Facebook, other Web sites, and blogs. At the same time, because her work would be read on a computer monitor, she was cautious about readers having to scroll through multiple screens. As a result, her posts tended to be brief. Because she was writing to an audience that knew her well (friends and family), she didn’t need to provide a great deal of information about her background. And because many of her friends and family shared her connection to the military, she did not feel that she had to justify her beliefs as strongly as she might have were she writing to another group of readers.