Context as Everything by Skye Anicca

From a young age we learn to understand and categorize the world through knowledge of context (The goat goes in the ___? Barn. The  doctor goes in the ___? Hospital). In any situation where rhetoric, or persuasion, is at play, there is a specific setting that helps you make sense of that situation. (Challenge question: Try to think of a situation involving communication where persuasion is not a factor.)

Consider how our very lives sit within what feels like an enormous, invisible container—the universe. We can’t readily define it in layperson’s terms, but for most of us, the word universe is enough to convey a specific entity. We also understand that the concept of “the universe” is incredibly general, that our everyday experiences—shopping, eating, studying—are all suspended within it: the context of all human life, therefore, is the universe. Equally true would be to say that the context of our lives is the earth, or our nation, or our family. Clearly, contexts may be perceived from wider and narrower vantage points. Context is the bubble—the everything (for us the universe or the earth, our nation or our family)—that frames or gives definition to the rhetorical situation.

One of the more obvious examples of rhetoric in our daily lives is the advertisement. Picture a billboard featuring a split panel: on one side is a well-dressed African-American woman riding the subway to work; on the second side is the same woman, wearing the same high-heeled shoes, dancing on a crowded dance floor. The text is the advertisement. The author is the shoe company. The purpose is to sell versatile shoes. The audience is likely modern, middle-class (upper class women are less likely to need double-duty footwear) American or Western European working women. As a college student who doesn't wear high-heels,you might not glance twice at this ad. However, imagine if this were 1950 and you were a Caucasian, middle-class housewife who had miraculously stumbled upon this advertisement. What might your reaction be? Likely you'd be scandalized, scrambling to decide which was more shocking—a woman working in heels, an African-American woman on an “integrated” train, or a woman dancing unescorted. Consider the same advertisement making its way to a small village in southern Mexico where  people still travel twenty miles by burro to the market to sell their wares. What would these people make of our billboard? The very different reactions of "readers" in these imagined settings dramatically demonstrate how context, as large and as difficult to describe as it is, does indeed affect the way messages are created and received. 

To apply this understanding of context to your writing, consider that the “everything” of a situation will determine all other aspects of the persuasive triangle: your purpose, your audience, even how you portray yourself as author/speaker/artist. As students, the context for your writing will often be academic. This means that to write well in that setting, you’ll need to be alert to the large and small elements that comprise the academic environment, those aspects of the context that will influence your rhetorical decisions. 

An understanding of context as the bubble that gives shape and meaning to our rhetoric has applications far beyond academic writing. Such an understanding allows us to creatively, compassionately, and effectively communicate with one another in a complex, demanding, and ever-changing world. 

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