Writing is a Situated and Contextual Process

Key Threshold Idea: Writing demands shift from context to context. The way we communicate must adjust to the specific situation we encounter.

Audio Example

Situated_Contextual Writing

Writing is contextually-specific; it must accommodate the situation and the audience.

Being able to “read the room”, identifying values and circumstances that shape the social context plays a key role in joining and meaningfully participating in a discourse community, academic or otherwise (see Seeley et al., 2022).

The success of one’s writing does not really depend on the small stuff. It’s about how the overarching message is tailored to the intended audience(s).

Writing is like an ongoing conversation with others. It’s an invitation to engage with the ideas the writer has presented, which can simultaneously teach and prompt deeper thinking in others. Knowing how to invoke one’s audience for a specific context ensures that the writing accomplishes just this.

"Regardless of the discourse community, gaining membership and authority involves recognizing the social context that surrounds communication. It demands that we read the room” (Seeley et al., 2022, p. 292).

“In school, it’s easy to believe that good writing is writing that doesn’t have grammatical errors or that follows the directions. But just by looking at examples from your own life, you can start to test and prove that such school-based ideas about writing are not accurate. Rather, the writing you do in your daily life ‘works’ if it is appropriate for the task at hand, the readers, the technologies being used, and the purpose” (Wardle & Downs, 2020, p. 14).

Writing is like an ongoing conversation: “this characteristic of writing is captured in what is referred to as the classic rhetorical triangle, which has at each of its points a key element in the creation and interpretation of meaning: writer (speaker, rhetor), audience (receiver, listener, reader), and text (message), all dynamically related in a particular context” (Lunsford, 2015, p. 20).

Lunsford, A. (2015). Writing addresses, invokes, and/or creates audiences. In L. Adler-Kassner

& E. Wardle (Eds.), Naming what we know: Threshold concepts of writing studies (pp. 20- 21). Utah State UP.

Seeley, S., Xu, K., & Chen, M. (2022). Read the room! Navigating social contexts and written

texts. Writing Spaces, 4, 281-300.

Wardle, E., & Downs, D. (Eds.). (2020). Writing about writing (4th ed.). Bedford/St. Martin’s.