www.bethkemp.co.uk by Beth Kemp is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.

Context:

How to write about it

The context of a text includes several factors:

Genre - what kind of text is it and how does this colour the kind of language that can be used?

Audience - for whom was this text produced?  What assumptions does the producer of the text make about the audience?  Again, how is this evidenced in the language?

Purpose - what are the purposes of this text (there’s very rarely only one)  What in the language tells you these are the purposes?

Writing about context at A Level requires more subtlety and precision than GCSE.  For example, a broadsheet article may indeed be intended for ‘an educated audience’, but if it’s a piece seeking to persuade people to buy organic fruit and veg, it assumes that its audience doesn’t already, and that they care about the issues the article raises.