what is social context essay

Social Context

‘Social Context’ refers to the immediate physical and social setting in which people live or in which something happens or develops. This includes the culture that the individual was educated or lives in, and the people and institutions with whom they interact. Social context influences and, to some extent, determines thought, feeling, and action. It ranges from a brief interaction with a stranger to broad societal and cultural forces.

Understanding Social Context

To grasp the concept of social context, we must delve into its components and the influence it exerts on individuals and societies.

Social context can be broken down into various elements, including cultural norms, social structures (like family or community), and the specific situation in which an individual finds themselves.

Influence on Behavior and Perceptions

Social context significantly impacts individual behavior, perceptions, and interactions. It can shape an individual’s values, beliefs, and expectations.

The Role in Different Fields

Social context plays a pivotal role across various disciplines, from psychology to sociology and beyond.

In Psychology

In psychology, social context is used to understand individual behavior in social situations and the influences of societal norms and structures.

In Sociology

Sociologists study social context to comprehend societal patterns, trends, and structures, helping them understand social phenomena and changes over time.

Understanding the social context offers valuable insights into various aspects of life and society.

Enhances Communication

By understanding the social context of a situation, we can communicate more effectively, considering cultural norms, values, and expectations.

Guides Policy and Decision-Making

Social context is crucial in informing policy-making, ensuring that decisions consider societal norms, values, and structures.

To further illuminate the concept, let’s consider some examples of social context.

Example 1: Educational Settings

The social context of a classroom— including its cultural norms, student-teacher dynamics, and broader school environment— can influence students’ learning and engagement.

Example 2: Online Communities

Online communities, like those on social media platforms, have their unique social contexts that impact user behavior, interactions, and content creation.

Recognizing and Analyzing Social Context

Being able to recognize and analyze social context is a valuable skill. Here are some tips to help.

Be Observant

Pay attention to the physical and social environment, the individuals involved, and the cultural and societal norms at play.

Keep an Open Mind

Maintain an open mind and be sensitive to cultural differences, acknowledging that social context can differ greatly between societies and groups.

In essence, social context is a crucial factor that shapes our behaviors, interactions, perceptions, and the world around us. By understanding and considering social context, we can communicate more effectively, make informed decisions, and appreciate the complexity and diversity of human societies.

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How Does Social Context Influence Our Brain and Behavior?

When we interact with others, the context in which our actions take place plays a major role in our behavior. This means that our understanding of objects, words, emotions, and social cues may differ depending on where we encounter them. Here, we explain how context affects daily mental processes, ranging from how people see things to how they behave with others. Then, we present the social context network model. This model explains how people process contextual cues when they interact, through the activity of the frontal, temporal, and insular brain regions. Next, we show that when those brain areas are affected by some diseases, patients find it hard to process contextual cues. Finally, we describe new ways to explore social behavior through brain recordings in daily situations.

Introduction

Everything you do is influenced by the situation in which you do it. The situation that surrounds an action is called its context. In fact, analyzing context is crucial for social interaction and even, in some cases, for survival. Imagine you see a man in fear: your reaction depends on his facial expression (e.g., raised eyebrows, wide-open eyes) and also on the context of the situation. The context can be external (is there something frightening around?) or internal (am I calm or am I also scared?). Such contextual cues are crucial to your understanding of any situation.

Context shapes all processes in your brain, from visual perception to social interactions [ 1 ]. Your mind is never isolated from the world around you. The specific meaning of an object, word, emotion, or social event depends on context ( Figure 1 ). Context may be evident or subtle, real or imagined, conscious or unconscious. Simple optical illusions demonstrate the importance of context ( Figures 1A,B ). In the Ebbinghaus illusion ( Figure 1A ), rings of circles surround two central circles. The central circles are the same size, but one appears to be smaller than the other. This is so because the surrounding circles provide a context. This context affects your perception of the size of the central circles. Quite interesting, right? Likewise, in the Cafe Wall Illusion ( Figure 1B ), context affects your perception of the lines’ orientation. The lines are parallel, but you see them as convergent or divergent. You can try focusing on the middle line of the figure and check it with a ruler. Contextual cues also help you recognize objects in a scene [ 2 ]. For instance, it can be easier to recognize letters when they are in the context of a word. Thus, you can see the same array of lines as either an H or an A ( Figure 1C ). Certainly, you did not read that phrase as “TAE CHT”, correct? Lastly, contextual cues are also important for social interaction. For instance, visual scenes, voices, bodies, other faces, and words shape how you perceive emotions in a face [ 3 ]. If you see Figure 1D in isolation, the woman may look furious. But look again, this time at Figure 1E . Here you see an ecstatic Serena Williams after she secured the top tennis ranking. This shows that recognizing emotions depends on additional information that is not present in the face itself.

• Figure 1 - Contextual affects how you see things.
• A,B. The visual context affects how you see shapes. C. Context also plays an important role in object recognition. Context-related objects are easier to recognize. “THE CAT” is a good example of contextual effects in letter recognition (reproduced with permission from Chun [ 2 ]). D,E. Context also affects how you recognize an emotion [by Hanson K. Joseph (Own work), CC BY-SA 4.0 ( http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0 ), via Wikimedia Commons].

Contextual cues also help you make sense of other situations. What is appropriate in one place may not be appropriate in another. Making jokes is OK when studying with your friends, but not OK during the actual exam. Also, context affects how you feel when you see something happening to another person. Picture someone being beaten on the street. If the person being beaten is your best friend, would you react in the same way as if he were a stranger? The reason why you probably answered “no” is that your empathy may be influenced by context. Context will determine whether you jump in to help or run away in fear. In sum, social situations are shaped by contextual factors that affect how you feel and act.

Contextual cues are important for interpreting social situations. Yet, they have been largely ignored in the world of science. To fill this gap, our group proposed the social context network model [ 1 ]. This model describes a brain network that integrates contextual information during social processes. This brain network combines the activity of several different areas of the brain, namely frontal, temporal, and insular brain areas ( Figure 2 ). It is true that many other brain areas are involved in processing contextual information. For instance, the context of an object that you can see affects processes in the vision areas of your brain [ 4 ]. However, the network proposed by our model includes the main areas involved in social context processing. Even contextual visual recognition involves activity of temporal and frontal regions included in our model [ 5 ].

• Figure 2 - The parts of the brain that work together, in the social context network model.
• This model proposes that social contextual cues are processed by a network of specific brain regions. This network is made up of frontal (light blue), temporal (orange), and insular (green) brain regions and the connections between these regions.

How Does Your Brain Process Contextual Cues in Social Scenarios?

To interpret context in social settings, your brain relies on a network of brain regions, including the frontal, temporal, and insular regions. Figure 2 shows the frontal regions in light blue. These regions help you update contextual information when you focus on something (say, the traffic light as you are walking down the street). That information helps you anticipate what might happen next, based on your previous experiences. If there is a change in what you are seeing (as you keep walking down the street, a mean-looking Doberman appears), the frontal regions will activate and update predictions (“this may be dangerous!”). These predictions will be influenced by the context (“oh, the dog is on a leash”) and your previous experience (“yeah, but once I was attacked by a dog and it was very bad!”). If a person’s frontal regions are damaged, he/she will find it difficult to recognize the influence of context. Thus, the Doberman may not be perceived as a threat, even if this person has been attacked by other dogs before! The main role of the frontal regions is to predict the meaning of actions by analyzing the contextual events that surround the actions.

Figure 2 shows the insular regions, also called the insula, in green. The insula combines signals from within and outside your body. The insula receives signals about what is going on in your guts, heart, and lungs. It also supports your ability to experience emotions. Even the butterflies you sometimes feel in your stomach depend on brain activity! This information is combined with contextual cues from outside your body. So, when you see that the Doberman breaks loose from its owner, you can perceive that your heart begins to beat faster (an internal body signal). Then, your brain combines the external contextual cues (“the Doberman is loose!”) with your body signals, leading you to feel fear. Patients with damage to their insular regions are not so good at tracking their inner body signals and combining them with their emotions. The insula is critical for giving emotional value to an event.

Lastly, Figure 2 shows the temporal regions marked with orange. The temporal regions associate the object or person you are focusing on with the context. Memory plays a major role here. For instance, when the Doberman breaks loose, you look at his owner and realize that it is the kind man you met last week at the pet shop. Also, the temporal regions link contextual information with information from the frontal and insular regions. This system supports your knowledge that Dobermans can attack people, prompting you to seek protection.

To summarize, combining what you experience with the social context relies on a brain network that includes the frontal, insular, and temporal regions. Thanks to this network, we can interpret all sorts of social events. The frontal areas adjust and update what you think, feel, and do depending on present and past happenings. These areas also predict possible events in your surroundings. The insula combines signals from within and outside your body to produce a specific feeling. The temporal regions associate objects and persons with the current situation. So, all the parts of the social context network model work together to combine contextual information when you are in social settings.

When Context Cannot be Processed

Our model helps to explain findings from patients with brain damage. These patients have difficulties processing contextual cues. For instance, people with autism find it hard to make eye contact and interact with others. They may show repetitive behaviors (e.g., constantly lining up toy cars) or excessive interest in a topic. They may also behave inappropriately and have trouble adjusting to school, home, or work. People with autism may fail to recognize emotions in others’ faces. Their empathy may also be reduced. One of our studies [ 6 ] showed that these problems are linked to a decreased ability to process contextual information. Persons with autism and healthy subjects performed tasks involving different social skills. Autistic people did poorly in tasks that relied on contextual cues—for instance, detecting a person’s emotion based on his gestures or voice tone. But, autistic people did well in tasks that didn’t require analyzing context, for example tasks that could be completed by following very general rules (for example, “never touch a stranger on the street”). Thus, the social problems that we often see in autistic people might result from difficulty in processing contextual cues.

Another disease that may result from problems processing contextual information is called behavioral variant frontotemporal dementia . Patients with this disease exhibit changes in personality and in the way they interact with others, after about age 60. They may do improper things in public. Like people with autism, they may not show empathy or may not recognize emotions easily. Also, they find it hard to deal with the details of context needed to understand social events. All these changes may reflect general problems processing social context information. These problems may be caused by damage to the brain network described above.

Our model can also explain patients with damage to the frontal lobes or those who have conditions such as schizophrenia or bipolar disorder [ 7 ]. Schizophrenia is a mental disorder characterized by atypical social cognition and inability to distinguish between real and imagined world (as in the case of hallucinations). Similar but milder problems appear in patients with bipolar disorder, which is another psychiatric condition mainly characterized by oscillating periods of depression and periods of elevated mood (called hypomania or mania).

In sum, the problems with social behavior seen in many diseases are probably linked to poor context processing after damage to certain brain areas, as proposed by our model ( Figure 2 ). Future research should explore how correct this model is, adding more data about the processes and regions it describes.

New Techniques to Assess Social Behavior and Contextual Processing

The results mentioned above are important for scientists and doctors. However, they have a great limitation. They do not reflect how people behave in daily life! Most of the research findings came from tasks in a laboratory, in which a person responded to pictures or videos. These tasks do not really represent how we act every day in our lives. Social life is much more complicated than sitting at a desk and pressing buttons when you see images on a computer, right? Research based on such tasks doesn’t reflect real social situations. In daily life, people interact in contexts that constantly change.

Fortunately, new methods allow scientists to assess real-life interactions. Hyperscanning is one of these methods. Hyperscanning allows measurement of the brain activity of two or more people while they perform activities together. For example, each subject can lie inside a separate scanner (a large tube containing powerful magnets). This scanner can detect changes in blood flow in the brain while the two people interact. This approach is used, for example, to study the brains of a mother and her child while they are looking at each other’s faces ( Figure 3A ).

• Figure 3 - New techniques to study processing of contextual cues.
• A. A mother and her infant look at each others’ facial expression while their brain activity is recorded (reproduced with permission from Masayuki et al. [ 8 ]). B. Hyperscanning of people interacting with each other during a game of Jenga (reproduced with permission from Liu et al. [ 9 ]). C. A new method of studying brain activity, called mobile brain/body imaging (MoBI) (reproduced with permission from Makeig et al. [ 10 ]). D. Virtual reality simulations of a virtual train at the station and a virtual train carriage (reproduced with permission from Freeman et al. [ 11 ]).

Hyperscanning can also be done using electroencephalogram equipment. Electroencephalography measures the electrical activity of the brain. Special sensors called electrodes are attached to the head. They are hooked by wires to a computer which records the brain’s electrical activity. Figure 3B shows an example of the use of electroencephalogram hyperscanning. This method has been used to measure the brain activity in two individuals while they are playing Jenga. Future research should apply this technique to study the processing of social contextual cues.

One limitation of hyperscanning is that it typically requires participants to remain still. However, real-life interactions involve many bodily actions. Fortunately, a new method called mobile brain/body imaging (MoBI, Figure 3C ) allows the measurement of brain activity and bodily actions while people interact in natural settings.

Another interesting approach is to use virtual reality . This technique involves fake situations. However, it puts people in different situations that require social interaction. This is closer to real life than the tasks used in most laboratories. As an example, consider Figure 3D . This shows a virtual reality experiment in which participants traveled through an underground tube station in London. Our understanding of the way context impacts social behavior could be expanded in future virtual reality studies.

In sum, future research should use new methods for measuring real-life interactions. This type of research could be very important for doctors to understand what happens to the processing of social context cues in various brain injuries or diseases. These realistic tasks are more sensitive than most of the laboratory tasks that are usually used for the assessment of patients with brain disorders.

Empathy : ↑ The ability to feel what another person is feeling, that is, to “place yourself in that person’s shoes.”

Autism : ↑ A general term for a group of complex disorders of brain development. These disorders are characterized by repetitive behaviors, as well as different levels of difficulty with social interaction and both verbal and non-verbal communications.

Behavioral Variant Frontotemporal Dementia : ↑ A brain disease characterized by progressive changes in personality and loss of empathy. Patients experience difficulty in regulating their behavior, and this often results in socially inappropriate actions. Patients typically start to show symptoms around age 60.

Hyperscanning : ↑ A novel technique to measure brain activity simultaneously from two people.

Virtual Reality : ↑ Computer technologies that use software to generate realistic images, sounds, and other sensations that replicate a real environment. This technique uses specialized display screens or projectors to simulate the user’s physical presence in this environment, enabling him or her to interact with the virtual space and any objects depicted there.

Conflict of Interest Statement

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest. The authors declare no competing financial interests.

Acknowledgements

This study was supported by grants from CONICYT/FONDECYT Regular (1170010), FONDAP 15150012, and the INECO Foundation.

[1] ↑ Ibanez, A., and Manes, F. 2012. Contextual social cognition and the behavioral variant of frontotemporal dementia. Neurology 78(17):1354–62. doi:10.1212/WNL.0b013e3182518375

[2] ↑ Chun, M. M. 2000. Contextual cueing of visual attention. Trends Cogn. Sci. 4(5):170–8. doi:10.1016/S1364-6613(00)01476-5

[3] ↑ Barrett, L. F., Mesquita, B., and Gendron, M. 2011. Context in emotion perception. Curr. Direct Psychol. Sci. 20(5):286–90. doi:10.1177/0963721411422522

[4] ↑ Beck, D. M., and Kastner, S. 2005. Stimulus context modulates competition in human extrastriate cortex. Nat. Neurosci. 8(8):1110–6. doi:10.1038/nn1501

[5] ↑ Bar, M. 2004. Visual objects in context. Nat. Rev. Neurosci. 5(8):617–29. doi:10.1038/nrn1476

[6] ↑ Baez, S., and Ibanez, A. 2014. The effects of context processing on social cognition impairments in adults with Asperger’s syndrome. Front. Neurosci. 8:270. doi:10.3389/fnins.2014.00270

[7] ↑ Baez, S, Garcia, A. M., and Ibanez, A. 2016. The Social Context Network Model in psychiatric and neurological diseases. Curr. Top. Behav. Neurosci. 30:379–96. doi:10.1007/7854_2016_443

[8] ↑ Masayuki, H., Takashi, I., Mitsuru, K., Tomoya, K., Hirotoshi, H., Yuko, Y., and Minoru, A. 2014. Hyperscanning MEG for understanding mother-child cerebral interactions. Front Hum Neurosci 8:118. doi:10.3389/fnhum.2014.00118

[9] ↑ Liu, N., Mok, C., Witt, E. E., Pradhan, A. H., Chen, J. E., and Reiss, A. L. 2016. NIRS-based hyperscanning reveals inter-brain neural synchronization during cooperative Jenga game with face-to-face communication. Front Hum Neurosci 10:82. doi:10.3389/fnhum.2016.00082

[10] ↑ Makeig, S., Gramann, K., Jung, T.-P., Sejnowski, T. J., and Poizner, H. 2009. Linking brain, mind and behavior: The promise of mobile brain/body imaging (MoBI). Int J Psychophys 73:985–1000

[11] ↑ Evans, N., Lister, R., Antley, A., Dunn, G., and Slater, M. 2014. Height, social comparison, and paranoia: An immersive virtual reality experimental study. Psych Res 218(3):348–52. doi:10.1016/j.psychres.2013.12.014

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What Is the Meaning of Social Context?

The term “social context” is generally used to describe the types of settings in which people are engaged, including the groups with whom they interact and the culture in how they live. Varieties of peoples’ customs, mindsets, traditions, and behaviors all influence their social context. Social context is also referred to as “social environment.”

Social Context in Today’s World

People often learn in social circles how to adopt prevailing behaviors, traditions, and norms. This learned behavior is a person’s recognition of social context in the environment. For instance, companies have particular ways that the workday is structured. Adhering to this structure may help someone be successful at the company. Going against the grain of certain attitudes and norms in a company may not help a person to remain for a long time with the company. 

Social Context as Social Environment

Social environment is another way of explaining social context. These social environments help to direct how people relate to one another, how family members live and communicate with each other, and even how governments interact with its citizens. Creating the right social environment will help to evolve the group’s social context. 

Social Context and Morality

A key concept behind social context is that it’s a foundation of a strong society. When people in social circles share their learned behaviors to help one another, they are creating a moral compass for the group, an element of a just and moral society. 

You see this in action when a tornado or flood strikes a town or city. People band together, mobilizing resources, and helping one another to seek shelter or clean up in the aftermath. These people show that their way of living ― their social context ― can benefit others through altruistic and moral good works.  

Examples of Social Context

In a particular social environment, people with these shared values find ways to build trust and reliance on one another. For example, local townspeople may bond together to thwart an unwanted development in their town. In doing so, they exhibit the characteristics of a shared social environment. 

In a classroom context, the class’s social context helps to define the spirit and ambiance of the classroom or its social context. For children, their social context is partially created by the teachers and administrators with whom they interact, the physical space in which learning takes place, and the strength of the teaching program. All of these factors can affect many of their activities, from participating in school activities to after-school sports activities. In these interactions with students, teachers, and facilitators, a student experiences levels of emotional and social growth. 

Social Context Study

A recent University of Chicago study focused attention on how we learn concepts of social context. Researchers looked at how young children might learn about concepts of hypocrisy and condemnation. The study showed how children as young as 7 years old were forming thoughts and notions that stealing is a moral failing, and those who would face condemnation were less likely to steal in the future. 

Negative Aspects of Social Context

Society is not without its negative aspects of social context. Sociologists study humans to learn about social context and how and when social context might veer to bad from good. This might be a shift in power or balance from one side to another. We see this in the divisive world of politics and the people who seek to protect and nurture their own interests. People in this social environment are often pressured to conform to the group’s ways to show uniformity among its members. 

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Social Psychology: Definition, Theories, Scope, & Examples

Saul Mcleod, PhD

Editor-in-Chief for Simply Psychology

BSc (Hons) Psychology, MRes, PhD, University of Manchester

Saul Mcleod, PhD., is a qualified psychology teacher with over 18 years of experience in further and higher education. He has been published in peer-reviewed journals, including the Journal of Clinical Psychology.

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Olivia Guy-Evans, MSc

Associate Editor for Simply Psychology

BSc (Hons) Psychology, MSc Psychology of Education

Olivia Guy-Evans is a writer and associate editor for Simply Psychology. She has previously worked in healthcare and educational sectors.

On This Page:

Social psychology is the scientific study of how people’s thoughts, feelings, beliefs, intentions, and goals are constructed within a social context by the actual or imagined interactions with others.

It, therefore, looks at human behavior as influenced by other people and the conditions under which social behavior and feelings occur.

Baron, Byrne, and Suls (1989) define social psychology as “the scientific field that seeks to understand the nature and causes of individual behavior in social situations” (p. 6).

Topics examined in social psychology include the self-concept , social cognition, attribution theory , social influence, group processes, prejudice and discrimination , interpersonal processes, aggression, attitudes , and stereotypes .

Social psychology operates on several foundational assumptions. These fundamental beliefs provide a framework for theories, research, and interpretations.

• Individual and Society Interplay : Social psychologists assume an interplay exists between individual minds and the broader social context. An individual’s thoughts, feelings, and behaviors are continuously shaped by social interactions, and in turn, individuals influence the societies they are a part of.
• Behavior is Contextual : One core assumption is that behavior can vary significantly based on the situation or context. While personal traits and dispositions matter, the circumstances or social environment often play a decisive role in determining behavior.
• Objective Reality is Difficult to Attain : Our perceptions of reality are influenced by personal beliefs, societal norms, and past experiences. Therefore, our understanding of “reality” is subjective and can be biased or distorted.
• Social Reality is Constructed : Social psychologists believe that individuals actively construct their social world . Through processes like social categorization, attribution, and cognitive biases, people create their understanding of others and societal norms.
• People are Social Beings with a Need to Belong : A fundamental assumption is the inherent social nature of humans. People have an innate need to connect with others, form relationships, and belong to groups. This need influences a wide range of behaviors and emotions.
• Attitudes Influence Behavior : While this might seem straightforward, it’s a foundational belief that our attitudes (combinations of beliefs and feelings) can and often do drive our actions. However, it’s also understood that this relationship can be complex and bidirectional.
• People Desire Cognitive Consistency : This is the belief that people are motivated to maintain consistency in their beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors. Cognitive dissonance theory , which posits that people feel discomfort when holding conflicting beliefs and are motivated to resolve this, is based on this assumption.
• People are Motivated to See Themselves in a Positive Light : The self plays a central role in social psychology. It’s assumed that individuals are generally motivated to maintain and enhance a positive self-view.
• Behavior Can be Predicted and Understood : An underlying assumption of any science, including social psychology, is that phenomena (in this case, human behavior in social contexts) can be studied, understood, predicted, and potentially influenced.
• Cultural and Biological Factors are Integral : Though earlier social psychology might have been criticized for neglecting these factors, contemporary social psychology acknowledges the roles of both biology (genes, hormones, brain processes) and culture (norms, values, traditions) in shaping social behavior.

Early Influences

Aristotle believed that humans were naturally sociable, a necessity that allows us to live together (an individual-centered approach), whilst Plato felt that the state controlled the individual and encouraged social responsibility through social context (a socio-centered approach).

Hegel (1770–1831) introduced the concept that society has inevitable links with the development of the social mind. This led to the idea of a group mind, which is important in the study of social psychology.

Lazarus & Steinthal wrote about Anglo-European influences in 1860. “Volkerpsychologie” emerged, which focused on the idea of a collective mind.

It emphasized the notion that personality develops because of cultural and community influences, especially through language, which is both a social product of the community as well as a means of encouraging particular social thought in the individual. Therefore Wundt (1900–1920) encouraged the methodological study of language and its influence on the social being.

Early Texts

Texts focusing on social psychology first emerged in the 20th century. McDougall published the first notable book in English in 1908 (An Introduction to Social Psychology), which included chapters on emotion and sentiment, morality, character, and religion, quite different from those incorporated in the field today.

He believed social behavior was innate/instinctive and, therefore, individual, hence his choice of topics.  This belief is not the principle upheld in modern social psychology, however.

Allport’s work (1924) underpins current thinking to a greater degree, as he acknowledged that social behavior results from interactions between people.

He also took a methodological approach, discussing actual research and emphasizing that the field was a “science … which studies the behavior of the individual in so far as his behavior stimulates other individuals, or is itself a reaction to this behavior” (1942: p. 12).

His book also dealt with topics still evident today, such as emotion, conformity, and the effects of an audience on others.

Murchison (1935) published The first handbook on social psychology was published by Murchison in 1935.  Murphy & Murphy (1931/37) produced a book summarizing the findings of 1,000 studies in social psychology.  A text by Klineberg (1940) looked at the interaction between social context and personality development. By the 1950s, several texts were available on the subject.

Journal Development

• 1950s – Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology

• 1963 – Journal of Personality, British Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology

• 1965 – Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Journal of Experimental Social Psychology

• 1971 – Journal of Applied Social Psychology, European Journal of Social Psychology

• 1975 – Social Psychology Quarterly, Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin

• 1982 – Social Cognition

• 1984 – Journal of Social and Personal Relationships

Early Experiments

There is some disagreement about the first true experiment, but the following are certainly among some of the most important.

Triplett (1898) applied the experimental method to investigate the performance of cyclists and schoolchildren on how the presence of others influences overall performance – thus, how individuals are affected and behave in the social context.

By 1935, the study of social norms had developed, looking at how individuals behave according to the rules of society. This was conducted by Sherif (1935).

Lewin et al. then began experimental research into leadership and group processes by 1939, looking at effective work ethics under different leadership styles.

Later Developments

Much of the key research in social psychology developed following World War II, when people became interested in the behavior of individuals when grouped together and in social situations. Key studies were carried out in several areas.

Some studies focused on how attitudes are formed, changed by the social context, and measured to ascertain whether a change has occurred.

Amongst some of the most famous works in social psychology is that on obedience conducted by Milgram in his “electric shock” study, which looked at the role an authority figure plays in shaping behavior.  Similarly,  Zimbardo’s prison simulation notably demonstrated conformity to given roles in the social world.

Wider topics then began to emerge, such as social perception, aggression, relationships, decision-making, pro-social behavior, and attribution, many of which are central to today’s topics and will be discussed throughout this website.

Thus, the growth years of social psychology occurred during the decades following the 1940s.

The scope of social psychology is vast, reflecting the myriad ways social factors intertwine with individual cognition and behavior.

Its principles and findings resonate in virtually every area of human interaction, making it a vital field for understanding and improving the human experience.

• Interpersonal Relationships : This covers attraction, love, jealousy, friendship, and group dynamics. Understanding how and why relationships form and the factors that contribute to their maintenance or dissolution is central to this domain.
• Attitude Formation and Change : How do individuals form opinions and attitudes? What methods can effectively change them? This scope includes the study of persuasion, propaganda, and cognitive dissonance.
• Social Cognition : This examines how people process, store, and apply information about others. Areas include social perception, heuristics, stereotypes, and attribution theories.
• Social Influence : The study of conformity, compliance, obedience, and the myriad ways individuals influence one another falls within this domain.
• Group Dynamics : This entails studying group behavior, intergroup relations, group decision-making processes, leadership, and more. Concepts like groupthink and group polarization emerge from this area.
• Prejudice and Discrimination : Understanding the roots of bias, racism, sexism, and other forms of prejudice, as well as exploring interventions to reduce them, is a significant focus.
• Self and Identity : Investigating self-concept, self-esteem, self-presentation, and the social construction of identity are all part of this realm.
• Prosocial Behavior and Altruism : Why do individuals sometimes help others, even at a cost to themselves? This area delves into the motivations and conditions that foster cooperative and altruistic behavior.
• Aggression : From understanding the underlying causes of aggressive behavior to studying societal factors that exacerbate or mitigate aggression, this topic seeks to dissect the nature of hostile actions.
• Cultural and Cross-cultural Dimensions : As societies become more interconnected, understanding cultural influences on behavior, cognition, and emotion is crucial. This area compares and contrasts behaviors across different cultures and societal groups.
• Environmental and Applied Settings : Social psychology principles find application in health psychology, environmental behavior, organizational behavior, consumer behavior, and more.
• Social Issues : Social psychologists might study the impact of societal structures on individual behavior, exploring topics like poverty, urban stress, and crime.
• Education : Principles of social psychology enhance teaching methods, address issues of classroom dynamics, and promote effective learning.
• Media and Technology : In the digital age, understanding the effects of media consumption, the dynamics of online communication, and the formation of online communities is increasingly relevant.
• Law : Insights from social psychology inform areas such as jury decision-making, eyewitness testimony, and legal procedures.
• Health : Concepts from social psychology are employed to promote health behaviors, understand doctor-patient dynamics, and tackle issues like addiction.

Example Theories

Allport (1920) – social facilitation.

Allport introduced the notion that the presence of others (the social group) can facilitate certain behavior.

It was found that an audience would improve an actor’s performance in well-learned/easy tasks but leads to a decrease in performance on newly learned/difficult tasks due to social inhibition.

Bandura (1963) Social Learning Theory

Bandura introduced the notion that behavior in the social world could be modeled. Three groups of children watched a video where an adult was aggressive towards a ‘bobo doll,’ and the adult was either just seen to be doing this, was rewarded by another adult for their behavior, or was punished for it.

Children who had seen the adult rewarded were found to be more likely to copy such behavior.

Festinger (1950) –  Cognitive Dissonance

Festinger, Schacter, and Black brought up the idea that when we hold beliefs, attitudes, or cognitions which are different, then we experience dissonance – this is an inconsistency that causes discomfort.

We are motivated to reduce this by either changing one of our thoughts, beliefs, or attitudes or selectively attending to information that supports one of our beliefs and ignores the other (selective exposure hypothesis).

Dissonance occurs when there are difficult choices or decisions or when people participate in behavior that is contrary to their attitude. Dissonance is thus brought about by effort justification (when aiming to reach a modest goal), induced compliance (when people are forced to comply contrary to their attitude), and free choice (when weighing up decisions).

Tajfel (1971) –  Social Identity Theory

When divided into artificial (minimal) groups, prejudice results simply from the awareness that there is an “out-group” (the other group).

When the boys were asked to allocate points to others (which might be converted into rewards) who were either part of their own group or the out-group, they displayed a strong in-group preference. That is, they allocated more points on the set task to boys who they believed to be in the same group as themselves.

This can be accounted for by Tajfel & Turner’s social identity theory, which states that individuals need to maintain a positive sense of personal and social identity: this is partly achieved by emphasizing the desirability of one’s own group, focusing on distinctions between other “lesser” groups.

Weiner (1986) – Attribution Theory

Weiner was interested in the attributions made for experiences of success and failure and introduced the idea that we look for explanations of behavior in the social world.

He believed that these were made based on three areas: locus, which could be internal or external; stability, which is whether the cause is stable or changes over time: and controllability.

Milgram (1963) – Shock Experiment

Participants were told that they were taking part in a study on learning but always acted as the teacher when they were then responsible for going over paired associate learning tasks.

When the learner (a stooge) got the answer wrong, they were told by a scientist that they had to deliver an electric shock. This did not actually happen, although the participant was unaware of this as they had themselves a sample (real!) shock at the start of the experiment.

They were encouraged to increase the voltage given after each incorrect answer up to a maximum voltage, and it was found that all participants gave shocks up to 300v, with 65 percent reaching the highest level of 450v.

It seems that obedience is most likely to occur in an unfamiliar environment and in the presence of an authority figure, especially when covert pressure is put upon people to obey. It is also possible that it occurs because the participant felt that someone other than themselves was responsible for their actions.

Haney, Banks, Zimbardo (1973) – Stanford Prison Experiment

Volunteers took part in a simulation where they were randomly assigned the role of a prisoner or guard and taken to a converted university basement resembling a prison environment. There was some basic loss of rights for the prisoners, who were unexpectedly arrested, and given a uniform and an identification number (they were therefore deindividuated).

The study showed that conformity to social roles occurred as part of the social interaction, as both groups displayed more negative emotions, and hostility and dehumanization became apparent.

Prisoners became passive, whilst the guards assumed an active, brutal, and dominant role. Although normative and informational social influence played a role here, deindividuation/the loss of a sense of identity seemed most likely to lead to conformity.

Both this and Milgram’s study introduced the notion of social influence and the ways in which this could be observed/tested.

Provides Clear Predictions

As a scientific discipline, social psychology prioritizes formulating clear and testable hypotheses. This clarity facilitates empirical testing, ensuring the field’s findings are based on observable and quantifiable phenomena.

The Asch conformity experiments hypothesized that individuals would conform to a group’s incorrect judgment.

The clear prediction allowed for controlled experimentation to determine the extent and conditions of such conformity.

Emphasizes Objective Measurement

Social psychology leans heavily on empirical methods, emphasizing objectivity. This means that results are less influenced by biases or subjective interpretations.

Double-blind procedures , controlled settings, and standardized measures in many social psychology experiments ensure that results are replicable and less prone to experimenter bias.

Empirical Evidence

Over the years, a multitude of experiments in social psychology have bolstered the credibility of its theories. This experimental validation lends weight to its findings and claims.

The robust body of experimental evidence supporting cognitive dissonance theory, from Festinger’s initial studies to more recent replications, showcases the theory’s enduring strength and relevance.

Limitations

Underestimates individual differences.

While social psychology often looks at broad trends and general behaviors, it can sometimes gloss over individual differences.

Not everyone conforms, obeys, or reacts in the same way, and these nuanced differences can be critical.

While Milgram’s obedience experiments showcased a startling rate of compliance to authority, there were still participants who resisted, and their reasons and characteristics are equally important to understand.

Ignores Biology

While social psychology focuses on the social environment’s impact on behavior, early theories sometimes neglect the biological underpinnings that play a role.

Hormones, genetics, and neurological factors can influence behavior and might intersect with social factors in complex ways.

The role of testosterone in aggressive behavior is a clear instance where biology intersects with the social. Ignoring such biological components can lead to an incomplete understanding.

Superficial Snapshots of Social Processes

Social psychology sometimes offers a narrow view, capturing only a momentary slice of a broader, evolving process. This might mean that the field fails to capture the depth, evolution, or intricacies of social processes over time.

A study might capture attitudes towards a social issue at a single point in time, but not account for the historical evolution, future shifts, or deeper societal underpinnings of those attitudes.

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Social context and the real-world consequences of social anxiety

1 Department of Psychology, University of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742 USA

Kathryn A. DeYoung

2 Department of Family Science, University of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742 USA

4 Department of Center for Healthy Families, University of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742 USA

Samiha Islam

Allegra s. anderson.

7 Department of Psychological Sciences, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN 37240 USA

Matthew G. Barstead

3 Department of Human Development and Quantitative Methodology, University of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742 USA

Alexander J. Shackman

5 Department of Neuroscience and Cognitive Science Program, University of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742 USA

6 Department of Maryland Neuroimaging Center, University of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742 USA

AUTHOR CONTRIBUTIONS

Associated Data

Social anxiety lies on a continuum, and young adults with elevated symptoms are at risk for developing a range of debilitating psychiatric disorders. Yet, relatively little is known about the factors that govern the hour-by-hour experience and expression of social anxiety in daily life.

Here, we used smartphone-based ecological momentary assessment (EMA) to intensively sample emotional experience across different social contexts in the daily lives of 228 young adults selectively recruited to represent a broad spectrum of social anxiety symptoms.

Leveraging data from over 11,000 real-world assessments, results highlight the central role of close friends, family members, and romantic partners. The presence of close companions is associated with enhanced mood, yet socially anxious individuals have smaller confidant networks and spend less time with their close companions. Although higher levels of social anxiety are associated with a general worsening of mood, socially anxious individuals appear to derive larger benefits—lower levels of negative affect, anxiety, and depression—from the presence of their closest companions. In contrast, variation in social anxiety was unrelated to the amount of time spent with strangers, co-workers, and acquaintances; and we uncovered no evidence of emotional hypersensitivity to less-familiar individuals.

Conclusions

Collectively, these findings provide a framework for understanding the deleterious consequences of social anxiety in emerging adulthood and set the stage for developing improved intervention strategies.

INTRODUCTION

Socially anxious individuals are prone to heightened fear, anxiety, and avoidance of social interactions and situations associated with potential social scrutiny ( Alden and Taylor 2004 , Heimberg et al. 2014 ). In addition to heightened negative affect (NA), socially anxious individuals tend to report lower levels of positive affect (PA) ( Kashdan and Collins 2010 , Anderson and Hope 2008 , Kashdan et al. 2011 , Geyer et al. 2018 ). Social anxiety symptoms lie on a continuum and, when extreme, can become debilitating ( Rapee and Spence 2004 , Craske et al. 2017 , Kessler 2003 , Lipsitz and Schneier 2000 , Katzelnick et al. 2001 , Stein et al. 2017 , Conway et al. 2019 , Krueger et al. 2018 , Ruscio 2019 ). Social anxiety disorder is among the most prevalent mental illnesses; contributes to the development of other psychiatric disorders, such as depression; and is challenging to treat ( Mathew et al. 2011 , Schneier et al. 1992 , Stein et al. 2017 , Craske et al. 2017 , Acarturk et al. 2009 , Rodebaugh et al. 2004 , Neubauer et al. 2013 ). Relapse and recurrence are common, and pharmaceutical treatments are associated with significant adverse effects ( Gordon and Redish 2016 , Batelaan et al. 2017 , Spinhoven et al. 2016 , Scholten et al. 2013 , Scholten et al. 2016 , Bruce et al. 2005 , Rhebergen et al. 2011 ). Yet the situational factors that govern the momentary experience and expression of social anxiety in the real world remain incompletely understood. To date, most of what it known is based on either retrospective report or acute laboratory challenges ( Afram and Kashdan 2015 , Alden and Wallace 1995 , Beck et al. 2006 , Buote et al. 2007 , Crişan et al. 2016 ).

As part of an on-going prospective-longitudinal study focused on individuals at risk for the development of mood and anxiety disorders, we used smartphone-based ecological momentary assessment (EMA) to intensively sample momentary levels of negative and positive affect in the daily lives of 228 young adults. Subjects were selectively recruited from a pool of 6,594 individuals screened for individual differences in dispositional negativity (i.e., negative emotionality), the tendency to experience more intense, frequent, or persistent levels of depression, worry, fear and anxiety—including social anxiety ( Shackman et al. 2016 , Hur et al. in press ). This ‘enrichment’ strategy enabled us to examine a broader spectrum of social anxiety symptoms than alternate approaches, such as convenience sampling. Because EMA data are captured in real time (e.g., Who are you with? ), they circumvent the biases that can distort retrospective reports, providing insights into how emotional experience dynamically responds to moment-by-moment changes in social context ( Lay et al. 2017 , Barrett 1997 , Csikszentmihalyi et al. 2013 , Shiffman et al. 2008 ). We focused on young adulthood because it is a time of profound, often stressful developmental transitions (e.g., moving away from home, forging new social relationships; Hays and Oxley 1986 , Alloy and Abramson 1999 , Arnett 2000 , Pancer et al. 2000 ). In fact, more than half of undergraduate students report overwhelming anxiety, with many experiencing the first onset or a recurrence of anxiety and mood disorders during this period ( Stein et al. 2017 , Global Burden of Disease Collaborators 2016 , Auerbach et al. 2016 , Auerbach et al. in press, Lipson et al. in press, American College Health Association 2016 ). In particular, those with elevated levels of social anxiety tend to experience substantial distress and impairment and are more likely to develop psychopathology ( Merikangas et al. 2002 ).

We were particularly interested in understanding how the momentary emotional experience of socially anxious individuals varies as a function of social context. Emotion is often profoundly social ( Fox and Shackman 2018 ). For instance, emotional experiences are routinely shared and dissected with friends, family, and romantic partners ( Rime 2009 ). Humans and other primates routinely seek the company of close companions in response to stressors, and increased social engagement promotes positive affect ( Shackman et al. 2018 , Cottrell and Epley 1977 ). Indeed, there is abundant evidence that close companions play a critical role in coping with stress and regulating negative affect ( Bolger and Eckenrode 1991 , Buote et al. 2007 , Coan and Sbarra 2015 , Marroquin 2011 , Myers 1999 , Zaki and Williams 2013 , Wade and Kendler 2000 , Kendler and Gardner 2014 , Ramsey and Gentzler 2015 , Reeck et al. 2016 ). Yet, many of these beneficial effects appear to be disrupted in socially anxious individuals ( Alden and Taylor 2004 ).

We began by testing whether social anxiety is associated with the amount of time allocated to different social contexts (e.g., with close companions) and whether this reflects the number of self-reported confidants. Social avoidance is diagnostic of social anxiety disorder, is a key component of dimensional measures of social anxiety, and contributes to functional impairment and reduced quality of life ( Liebowitz 1987 , APA 2013 , Beidel et al. 1999 , Strahan and Conger 1999 , Turner et al. 1986 ). Among community samples, adults with elevated levels of social anxiety are less likely to have a close friend and more likely to be unmarried by mid-life ( Davidson et al. 1994 ). They are also more likely to be lonely ( Lim et al. 2016 ). Recent work using unobtrusive, smartphone-based global positioning system (GPS) data provides additional evidence suggestive of social inhibition and avoidance ( Boukhechba et al. 2018 ), demonstrating that socially anxious university students spend significantly less time at ‘leisure’ (e.g., gymnasiums, pubs, cinemas, and coffee shops) and ‘food’ (e.g., restaurants, food courts, and dining halls) locations during peak hours in the evening. Socially anxious students also spent more time at home or off-campus (e.g., parents’ home), particularly on weekends, and visited fewer locations overall, suggesting a more restricted range of activities (see also Chow et al. 2017 ). Whether this pattern reflects generalized avoidance, specific avoidance of socially ‘distant’ individuals (e.g., strangers, acquaintances), or a lack of confidants remains unknown.

Next, we used a series of multilevel models (MLMs) to understand the interactive effects of social anxiety and the social environment on momentary affect. This enabled us to test whether socially anxious individuals experience heightened NA and attenuated PA in the presence of distant others, as one would expect based on laboratory studies of semi-structured and unstructured interactions with unfamiliar peers and researchers ( Kashdan et al. 2013b , Kashdan and Roberts 2004 , Kashdan and Roberts 2006 , Kashdan and Roberts 2007 , Heerey and Kring 2007 , Crişan et al. 2016 , Coles et al. 2002 , Creed and Funder 1998 , Meleshko and Alden 1993 ). Likewise, EMA research indicates that children with social anxiety disorder experience diminished PA in the presence of distant others ( Morgan et al. 2017 ). Whether this pattern is evident in adults is, as yet, unknown.

Using a MLM approach, we also tested two competing predictions about the consequences of close companions. One possibility is that socially anxious individuals derive increased emotional benefits (e.g., lower levels of NA) from close companions. Consistent with this view, the presence of a friend has been shown to normalize behavioral signs of anxiety and reduce negative self-thoughts in socially anxious adults exposed to an experimental speech challenge ( Pontari 2009 ). Likewise, diary studies suggest that spousal support plays a key role in dampening negative affect among patients with social anxiety disorder ( Zaider et al. 2010 ) and EMA studies suggests that the presence of close companions is associated with disproportionately enhanced PA in children with social anxiety disorder ( Morgan et al. 2017 ) and adults with elevated levels of dispositional negativity ( Shackman et al. 2018 ). More broadly, a variety of work suggests that individuals with low levels of psychological well-being and patients with depression reap larger emotional benefits from positive daily events ( Rottenberg 2017 , Lamers et al. 2018 , Grosse Rueschkamp et al. in press ). Although socially anxious adults often show symptoms of depression and anhedonia, it is unclear whether similar benefits extend to this population.

A competing possibility is that socially anxious individuals fail to capitalize on available socio-emotional support. Indeed, socially anxious individuals tend to be less emotionally expressive, disclosing, and intimate with companions ( Cuming and Rapee 2010 , Meleshko and Alden 1993 , Sparrevohn and Rapee 2009 , Vernberg et al. 1992 , Williams et al. 2018 ). They perceive themselves as receiving less social support ( Torgrud et al. 2004 , Cuming and Rapee 2010 , La Greca and Lopez 1998 ); perceive their friendships to be of a lower quality ( Rodebaugh 2009 , Rodebaugh et al. 2015 ); are less satisfied with friends, family, and romantic partners ( Stein and Kean 2000 , Wong et al. 2012 , Starr and Davila 2008 ); and are prone to emotional neediness and overreliance ( Davila and Beck 2002 , Darcy et al. 2005 ). Perhaps as a consequence, socially anxious individuals report elevated levels of interpersonal conflict ( Cuming and Rapee 2010 ) and, among patients, marked impairment of interpersonal relationships ( Wittchen et al. 2000 , Rapaport et al. 2005 , Olatunji et al. 2007 , Stein et al. 2017 ). Collectively, these observations motivate the prediction that socially anxious individuals derive smaller emotional benefits or even costs (e.g., higher levels of NA) from close companions.

Discovering the situational factors associated with the real-world experience of social anxiety is important. The identification of potentially modifiable targets, such as social context, has the potential to guide the development of improved intervention strategies.

As part of an on-going prospective-longitudinal study focused on individuals at risk for the development of internalizing disorders, we used well-established measures of dispositional negativity (often termed neuroticism or negative emotionality; Shackman et al. 2016 , Shackman et al. 2018 ) to screen 6,594 young adults (57.1% female; 59.0% White, 19.0% Asian, 9.9% African American, 6.3% Hispanic, 5.8% Multiracial/Other; M = 19.2 years, SD = 1.1 years). Screening data were stratified into quartiles (top quartile, middle quartiles, bottom quartile) separately for males and females. Individuals who met preliminary inclusion criteria were independently recruited from each of the resulting six strata. Approximately half the subjects were recruited from the top quartile, with the remainder split between the middle and bottom quartiles (i.e., 50% high, 25% medium, and 25% low). Given the typically robust relations between measures of dispositional negativity and social anxiety— R 2 = .25 in the present sample—this ‘enrichment’ strategy allowed us to examine a relatively wide range of social anxiety symptoms without gaps or discontinuities. All subjects were first-year university students in good physical health and access to a smartphone. All reported the absence of a lifetime psychotic, bipolar, neurological, or developmental disorder. Given the focus of the larger prospective-longitudinal study on risk for the development of mental illness, all subjects reported the absence of current alcohol/substance abuse, suicidal ideation, internalizing disorder (past 2 months), and psychiatric treatment. To maximize the range of psychiatric risk, subjects with a lifetime history of anxiety and mood disorders were not excluded, consistent with prior work (Alloy, Abramson et al. 2000). At the baseline laboratory session, subjects provided informed written consent, were familiarized with the EMA protocol (see below), and completed the social anxiety and social network assessments. Beginning the next day, subjects completed up to 8 EMA surveys/day for 7 days. All procedures were approved by the University of Maryland Institutional Review Board and the sample does not overlap with that detailed in prior work by our group ( Shackman et al. 2018 ).

Two-hundred and forty-two subjects completed the baseline assessment and EMA protocol. Fourteen subjects were excluded from analyses: 2 withdrew and 12 (~5%) failed to complete >39 survey prompts (70% compliance). The final sample included 228 subjects (51.3% female; 62.7% White, 17.5% Asian, 8.3% African American, 4.9% Hispanic, 6.6% Multiracial/Other; M = 18.76 years, SD = 0.35 years).

Power Analysis

Sample size was determined a priori as part of the application for the award that supported this research (R01-MH107444). The target sample size ( N ≈ 240) was chosen to afford acceptable power and precision given available resources (Schönbrodt & Perugini, 2013). At the time of study design, G-power 3.1.9.2 ( http://www.gpower.hhu.de ) indicated >99% power to detect a benchmark medium-sized effect ( r = .30) with up to 20% planned attrition ( N = 192 usable datasets) using α = .05 (two-tailed).

Social Anxiety

At baseline, the self-report version of the Liebowitz Social Anxiety Scale (LSAS) was used to quantify social anxiety ( Liebowitz 1987 ). Subjects used a 0 ( none ) to 3 ( severe ) scale to rate the amount of fear and anxiety they typically experience in response to 24 everyday situations (e.g., going to a party , meeting strangers , returning goods to a store , speaking up at meeting ). They used a 0 ( never ) to 3 ( usually ) rating scale to rate frequency of avoiding the 24 situations. Social anxiety was quantified by summing the 48 responses. As shown in Figure 1 , LSAS scores were approximately normally distributed ( M = 41.7, SD = 22.0, Range = 1–121, α = .95) and somewhat higher than that previously reported in large university convenience samples (N = 856, M = 34.7, SD = 20.4; Russell and Shaw 2009 ) 1 , 2 .

Social anxiety was assessed at baseline using the self-report version of the Liebowitz Social Anxiety Scale (LSAS). The two highest cases were not excluded because they are sensible—given the nature of the scale and the sample—and because they did not exert undue statistical leverage ( Hoaglin and Iglewicz, 1987 , Hoaglin et al., 1986 ). Exploratory analyses indicated that the exclusion of these cases did not meaningfully alter the results (not reported).

Social Network Size

At baseline, the number of close companions was measured using an item ( How many people do you know where you have a close, confiding relationship and can share your most private feelings? ) from the modified Kendler Social Support Inventory (MKSSI; Spoozak et al. 2009 ). Single-item measures of social network size are routinely used in epidemiology research (e.g., Kendler et al. 2005 , Kocalevent et al. 2018 , Van Lente et al. 2012 ). The resulting descriptive statistics ( M = 5.6, SD = 4.1, Range = 0 – 30) are broadly consistent with the results of past work focused on confidant networks in university students ( Sarason et al. 1983 , Freberg et al. 2010 ) and friendship networks in community-dwelling adults ( Wang and Wellman 2010 ).

EMA Procedures

SurveySignal ( Hofmann and Patel 2015 ) was used to automatically deliver 8 text messages/day to each subject’s smartphone. On weekdays, messages were delivered every 1.5 to 3 hours ( M = 115 minutes, SD = 25) between 8:30 AM and 10:30 PM. As in prior work by our group ( Shackman et al. 2018 ), weekday messages were delivered during the ‘passing periods’ between regularly scheduled university courses to maximize compliance. On weekends, messages were delivered every 1.5 to 2.5 hours ( M = 99 minutes, SD = 17) between 11:00 AM and 11:00 PM. Messages were delivered according to a fixed schedule that varied across days (e.g., the third message was delivered at 12:52 PM on Mondays and 12:16 PM on Tuesdays). Messages contained a link to a secure on-line survey. Subjects were instructed to respond within 30 minutes (Latency: Median = 2 min, SD = 7 min, Interquartile Range = 9 min) and to refrain from responding at unsafe or inconvenient moments (e.g., while driving). A reminder was sent when subjects failed to respond within 15 minutes. During the baseline laboratory session, several well-established procedures were used to maximize compliance ( Palmier‐Claus et al. 2011 ), including: (1) delivering a test message in the laboratory and confirming that the subject was able to successfully complete the on-line EMA survey, (2) 24/7 technical support, and (3) monetary bonuses. Base compensation was $10, with $20 bonuses for ≥70% and ≥80% compliance, respectively ( Total = $10-$50). In the final sample, EMA compliance was acceptable ( M = 87.9%, SD = 6.2%, Minimum = 71.4%, Total = 11,224) and unrelated to social anxiety, p = .77.

Current NA ( afraid, nervous, worried, hopeless, sad ) and PA ( calm, cheerful, content, enthusiastic, joy, relaxed ) at the time of the survey prompt was rated using a 0 ( not at all ) to 4 ( extremely ) scale. Subjects also indicated their current social context ( “At the time of ping, who was around?” ): alone, close friend(s), family, friend(s), romantic partner, acquaintance(s), co-worker(s), and/or stranger(s). Composite measures of NA and PA were computed by averaging the relevant items ( α s > .92). To enable follow-up assessments of generality, composite anxiety ( afraid, nervous, worried ) and depression ( hopeless, sad ) facet scales were computed ( α s > .88). Building on prior work by our group and others ( Shackman et al. 2018 , Diener and Seligman 2002 ), friends, close friends, family, and romantic partners were re-coded as ‘Close’ companions. Acquaintances, co-workers, and strangers were re-coded as ‘Distant’ companions. This approach is conceptually similar to the distinction between ‘strong’ and ‘weak’ social connections ( Granovetter 1973 ). Analyses indicated that assessments completed in the presence of a mixture of Close and Distant companions (8%) showed intermediate effects and are omitted from the report.

Analytic Strategy

The overarching aim of the present study was to understand the joint explanatory influence of Social Anxiety (LSAS) and Social Context (EMA) on real-world Affect (EMA-derived NA, PA). In all cases, hypothesis testing employed a continuous measure of Social Anxiety.

We began by testing whether variation in Social Anxiety prospectively predicts the aggregate amount of time allocated to different social contexts. A standard multivariate mediation framework was then used to test whether relations between Social Anxiety and Social Context were statistically attributable, in part, to variation in Social Network Size (e.g., elevated social anxiety → fewer confidants → less time with close companions ) ( Hayes 2017 ), where Size was indexed using the MKSSI. As in prior work by our group ( Stout et al. 2017 ), the significance of the indirect effect (‘mediation’) was assessed using non-parametric bootstrapping (5,000 samples). Although the mediation framework provides useful information, it rests on strong assumptions and positive results do not license causal inferences ( Green et al. 2010 , Bullock et al. 2010 ). Pirateplots were created using the yaRrr package for R ( Phillips 2017 ). Hotelling’s test for dependent correlations was computed using FZT ( https://psych.unl.edu/psycrs/statpage/comp.html ).

Next, a series of MLMs was implemented in SPSS (version 24.0.0.0) with momentary assessments of Affect and Social Context nested within subjects and intercepts free to vary across subjects. Separate MLMs were computed for NA and PA. Level 2 variables (i.e., Social Anxiety) were mean centered.

The equations defined below outline the basic structure of our final MLMs in standard notation ( Raudenbush and Bryk 2002 ). At the first level, Affect during EMA t for individual i was modeled as a function of Social Context:

Alone served as the dummy-coded reference category for primary analyses (as in Equation 1 ). Distant companions served as the reference category for follow-up analyses 3 .

At the second level, the association between Social Context and Affect was modeled as a function of individual differences in Social Anxiety:

Conceptually, this enabled us to test prospective relations between Social Anxiety and Affect, cross-sectional relations between EMA-derived measures of Social Context and Affect, and the potentially interactive effects of Social Anxiety and Social Context. We also explored the impact of incorporating variation in the amount of time allocated to different contexts as a nuisance variable. For significant effects, we examined generality across NA facets (i.e., anxious and depressed mood). As an additional validity check, we confirmed that similar results were obtained when two authors independently analyzed the data using SPSS (J.H.) and R (M.G.B.), respectively.

Momentary Emotional Experience Covaries with Social Context

Consistent with other work in young adults ( Shackman et al. 2018 , Reed W Larson 1990 , Berry and Hansen 1996 ), our sample spent slightly more than half their time with others (Close = 44.1%, Distant = 13.4%, Alone = 42.5%), although there were marked individual differences in the amount of time devoted to each social environment ( Figure 2 ). Individuals who spent more time with close others reported lower average levels of NA ( r = −.14, p = .03) and higher average levels of PA ( r = .31, p < .000). Conversely, those who spent more time alone reported higher average levels of NA ( r = .14, p = .03) and lower average levels of PA ( r = −.28, p < .001), replicating past work (e.g., Diener and Seligman 2002 , Shackman et al. 2018 , Oishi et al. 2007 , Diener et al. 2018 , Rogers et al. 2018 ). The average amount of time spent with distant others was unrelated to average mood ( p s > .20). In sum, individuals who spend more time with close companions report modestly enhanced mood, whereas those who are prone to seclusion show the opposite effect.

Figure depicts the data ( jittered gray points; individual participants ), density distribution ( colored bean plots ), Bayesian 95% highest density interval (HDI; white bands ), and mean ( black bars ) for each social context. HDIs permit population-generalizable visual inferences about mean differences and were estimated using 1,000 samples from a posterior Gaussian distribution

Socially Anxious Individuals Spend Less Time with Close Companions and Have Smaller Confidant Networks

On average, individuals with higher levels of social anxiety spent significantly less time in the company of close companions ( r = −.16, p = .01) and showed a trend to spend more time alone ( r = .13, p = .06), as in prior work ( Afram and Kashdan 2015 , Alden and Taylor 2004 ). A mediation analysis suggested that this reflects reduced access to close companions. As shown in Figure 3 , individuals with higher levels of social anxiety report fewer confidants ( a = −.19, p = .005), consistent with prior work ( Davidson et al. 1994 , Montgomery et al. 1991 , La Greca and Lopez 1998 ). Individuals with fewer confidants were, in turn, less likely to be in the presence of close companions ( b = .31, p < .001) at the time of momentary assessment 4 . Bootstrapped 95% confidence intervals for the indirect effect excluded zero, indicating significant mediation. Likewise, the direct effect of social anxiety on the amount of time spent with close companions was no longer significant after accounting for variation in the number of confidants ( c ’ path in Figure 3 ; p > .10). 5 Notably, social anxiety was not significantly related to the amount of time spent with distant companions ( p = .20), contraindicating a general bias to avoid others. The association between social anxiety and the amount of time allocated to close companions was significantly stronger than that with distant companions, t Hotelling = 2.18, p = .03.

Figure depicts significant mediation models for the amount of time allocated to close companions. Path labels indicate standardized regression coefficients, with c’ indicating the coefficient while controlling for variation in the self-reported number of confidants. Socially anxious individuals report fewer confidants, and individuals with fewer confidants were, in turn, less likely to be in the presence of close companions at the time of momentary assessment.

Social Anxiety is Associated with Diminished Real-World Emotional Experience

MLM analyses demonstrated that social anxiety is associated with reduced quality of real-world emotional experience. Individuals with higher levels of social anxiety report significantly increased NA ( t = 25.2, b = .12, SE = .005, p < .001) and reduced PA ( t = −24.1, b = −.19, SE = .008, p < .001), consistent with past research ( Kashdan 2004 , Kashdan et al. 2013a , Kashdan et al. 2013b , Kashdan and Steger 2006 ) 6 .

The Quality of Momentary Emotional Experience Covaries with the Presence of Close Companions

Relative to seclusion or the presence of distant others, MLM results showed that close companions are associated with lower levels of NA (Alone: t = −.7.51, b = −.09, SE = .012, p < .001; Distant: t = −6.71, b = −.10, SE = .015, p < .001) and higher levels of PA (Alone: t = 15.79, b = .31, SE = .019, p < .001; Distant: t = 15.03, b = .37, SE = .025, p <.001). Relative to seclusion, distant companions are associated with lower levels of PA (PA: t = −2.59, b = −.06, SE = .024, p = .01; NA: p > .30). Results were similar when controlling for variation in the amount of time allocated to different social contexts ( Supplementary Table S1 ). These findings reinforce the conclusion that the quality of momentary emotional experience is positively associated with the presence of close friends, family, and romantic partners.

Socially Anxious Individuals Derive Larger Emotional Benefits from Close Companions

We next considered the joint impact of social anxiety and social context on momentary mood ( Table 1 ). As shown in Figure 4 , the results of this more comprehensive MLM revealed that socially anxious individuals derive larger emotional benefits—indexed by significantly lower levels of NA—from close companions relative to seclusion (Social Anxiety × Close-Alone, t = −2.27, b = −.03, SE = .012, p = .02). In short, individuals with higher levels of social anxiety tend to experience the least intense, most normative levels of NA in the company of friends, family, and romantic partners. This effect remained significant after controlling for the amount of time allocated to different social contexts ( Supplementary Table S2 ) 7 . Other interactions were not significant for NA or PA ( p > .80). That is, social anxiety was not associated with an exaggerated emotional response in the presence of co-workers, strangers, and other distant companions ( Figure 4 and Table 1 ). The same general pattern of results was evident for analyses focused on the anxious and depressed facets of momentary NA ( Supplementary Tables S3 – S4 ).

The deleterious impact of social anxiety on momentary emotional experience critically depends on social context. Individuals with higher levels of social anxiety derive larger emotional benefits—larger decrements in negative affect (NA)—from close companions relative to being alone ( left side of display ). Hypothesis testing relied on a continuous measure of social anxiety. For illustrative purposes, predicted values derived from multilevel modeling are depicted for extreme levels (±1 SD) of social anxiety. Abbreviation—SA: Social anxiety.

The Impact of Social Anxiety and Social Context on Momentary Emotional Experience

Social anxiety lies on a continuum, from mild to debilitating, and young adults with elevated symptoms of social anxiety are more likely to show significant impairment and develop frank psychopathology. The present study provides new insights into the ways in which real-world emotional experience varies as a function of social anxiety and the social environment. Our results demonstrate that the presence of close companions is associated with lower levels of momentary NA ( Figure 4 ), including anxiety and depression. Importantly, individuals with higher levels of social anxiety were found to spend significantly less time with close companions and a mediation analysis suggested that this association is partially explained by smaller confidant networks ( Figure 3 ). Social anxiety was unrelated to the number of assessments completed in the presence of co-workers, strangers, and other distant companions, contraindicating a general social avoidance bias. Although social anxiety was prospectively associated with a diminished quality of momentary emotional experience (i.e., increased NA and reduced PA), MLM analyses demonstrated that individuals with higher levels of social anxiety derive significantly larger benefits—manifesting as lower levels of NA, anxiety, and depression—from the company of close companions ( Figure 4 ). In contrast, socially anxious individuals were not disproportionately sensitive to the presence of distant companions ( Table 1 and Figure 4 ). Indeed, they showed similarly high levels of NA when they were alone. Although social anxiety research and treatment has predominantly focused on responses to novelty and potential threat, our results underscore the centrality of friends, family, and romantic partners. These findings provide a framework for understanding the deleterious consequences of extreme social anxiety and guiding the development of improved intervention strategies.

The present findings extend developmental and laboratory research highlighting the importance of social and interpersonal processes for emotion regulation and mental wellbeing ( Coan and Sbarra 2015 , Zaki and Williams 2013 , Reeck et al. 2016 , Maresh et al. 2013 , Rubin et al. 2018 ). Our observations motivate the hypothesis that the pervasive NA characteristic of socially anxious young adults partially reflects difficulties forming or maintaining close relationships, consistent with work focused on children and adolescents at risk for developing social anxiety disorder ( Shackman et al. 2016 , Markovic and Bowker 2017 , Rubin et al. 2018 , Frenkel et al. 2015 , Ladd et al. 2011 ). With fewer confidants, socially anxious individuals spend significantly less time with close companions and are less frequent beneficiaries of their mood-enhancing effects ( Figures 3 – 4 ). Socially anxious individuals appear to have an intact capacity for social mood enhancement. Indeed, they show lower levels of NA in the company of close companions, in broad accord with work focused on depressed samples ( Rottenberg 2017 ). This model is well aligned with evidence from prospective longitudinal studies which indicate that close friendships and other kinds of social support and intimacy reduce the risk of developing anxiety symptoms in adolescence and early adulthood ( Narr et al. 2019 , Frenkel et al. 2015 , Tillfors et al. 2012 , Teachman and Allen 2007 , Rodebaugh 2009 ). Likewise, among patients undergoing treatment for social anxiety, higher levels of perceived social support are associated with a more favorable prognosis ( Rapee et al. 2015 ).

Naturally, our results do not license causal inferences. We cannot rule out the possibility that reduced access to confidants begets higher levels of social anxiety or, more likely, that these two constructs exert bi-directional effects ( Rubin et al. 2018 ). Likewise, it could be that socially anxious individuals actively seek out the company of close companions when they are experiencing lower levels of NA. Nevertheless, randomized laboratory studies reinforce the conclusion that close companions play a key role in mitigating NA. For example, the presence of a close companion has been shown to normalize negative affect and catastrophic cognitions ( ‘I’m going to die’ ) in anxiety patients exposed to a panic-inducing CO 2 challenge ( Carter et al. 1995 ) and to normalize behavioral signs of anxiety in socially anxious young adults during a videotaped speech challenge ( Pontari 2009 ). Taken with the present results, these observations motivate the hypothesis that friends, romantic partners, and family members serve as a regulatory ‘prosthesis’ for socially anxious individuals.

Relying on close companions is risky. This is particularly true for socially anxious individuals, who tend to experience elevated levels of interpersonal conflict ( Cuming and Rapee 2010 ) and, among patients, profound impairment of interpersonal relationships ( Wittchen et al. 2000 , Rapaport et al. 2005 , Olatunji et al. 2007 , Stein et al. 2017 ). Relationship distress and dissolution reduces or eliminates the possibility of interpersonal emotion regulation and, ultimately, can contribute to the development, maintenance, and recurrence of psychopathology ( Baucom et al. 2014 , Whisman and Baucom 2012 , Rehman et al. 2008 , Marroquin 2011 ). Even in the absence of relationship problems, as young adults transition to full-time employment, marriage, and parenting, social network size begins to decline and more time is spent with distant companions or alone ( Wrzus et al. 2016 , Wrzus et al. 2013 , R. W. Larson 1990 , Sander et al. 2017 , Lansford et al. 1998 )—effects that may be amplified in more recent cohorts, which tend to allocate less time to face-to-face social interaction and experience elevated levels of loneliness ( Twenge et al. 2019 ). Many middle-aged and older adults report that they have no confidant ( McPherson and Smith-Lovin 2006 ), depriving them of the emotional benefits of close companions. This is likely to be exacerbated among individuals with elevated levels of social anxiety, who are less likely to have close friends and more likely to be unmarried by mid-life ( Davidson et al. 1994 , Montgomery et al. 1991 , La Greca and Lopez 1998 ). Extending the present approach to earlier and later developmental periods is an important challenge for future research, and prospective-longitudinal studies are likely to be especially fruitful.

Social anxiety is often cast as an increased sensitivity to scrutiny from others, especially unfamiliar others, which manifests as heightened avoidance, fear (‘phobia’), and anxiety ( American Psychiatric Association 2013 ). The present results underscore the need to broaden this perspective. As indexed by EMA, social anxiety was unrelated to the amount of time spent with distant companions. Moreover, socially anxious individuals did not experience heightened NA in the presence of distant companions ( Table 1 and Figure 4 ). This suggests that, in the absence of clear signs of rejection, scrutiny, or threat, socially anxious individuals tend to show normative emotional responses to distant companions. Another possibility is that hyper-reactivity to strangers is specific to pathological levels of social anxiety or is only evident in a subset of socially anxious individuals. Adjudicating between these accounts represents another important avenue for future research.

From a clinical perspective, these observations suggest that naturally occurring social relationships are a potentially important target for intervention. Existing treatments for social anxiety typically focus on the individual, but our results highlight the value of simultaneously considering the role of close companions and developing supplementary interventions to enhance social connection, acceptance, and support. This could take the form of nurturing social-cognitive skills (e.g., emotional disclosure), cultivating stronger and more frequent ties with existing companions and social networks (e.g., via behavioral activation approaches), or reducing maladaptive thoughts and behaviors (e.g., neediness, overreliance) that promote conflict and rejection ( Masi et al. 2011 , Cacioppo et al. 2015 , Kok and Singer 2017 ). The development of smartphone-based interventions would provide a scalable and cost-effective alternative to more traditional modalities—already, 77% of U.S. adults, and 94% of U.S. adults aged 18–29 own a smartphone ( Pew Research Center 2018 ). Mobile applications may be especially effective for individuals who are unable or unwilling to use traditional care delivery systems and for subclinical presentations of social anxiety that do not warrant resource-intensive treatments ( Ruscio 2019 ). Regardless of delivery method, intervention research would also provide a crucial opportunity for testing the causal contribution of close companions to the everyday experience of social anxiety.

Our results highlight some additional avenues for future research. To understand the generalizability of our inferences, it will be useful to extend the present approach to larger and more representative samples and to populations with more severe symptoms, distress, and impairment. Future EMA studies may benefit from using larger sampling windows or selectively targeting periods of increased stress or disrupted social intimacy (e.g., transition from high school or university, or from university to full-time work) in order to capture a wider range of social interactions and their association with momentary affect. It will also be helpful to examine the nature and quality of naturalistic social interactions—including momentary perceptions of social connection, emotional support, and conflict—in more detail using either EMA (e.g., context- or event-triggered) or behavioral observations. Developing a clearer understanding of the processes that promote heightened levels of NA during periods of solitude—when both social support and social threat are absent ( Figure 4 )—is also likely to be fruitful ( Shackman et al. 2016 ).

In sum, the present study suggests that close companions play an important role in the momentary experience of socially anxious young adults. The use of well-established techniques for intensive EMA and a relatively large sample selectively recruited from a pool of more than 6,000 young adults increases our confidence in the reproducibility and translational relevance of these findings. These results set the stage for developing improved strategies for treating or preventing the sequelae of extreme social anxiety.

Supplementary Material

Acknowledgements.

The authors acknowledge the assistance of C. Garbin, L. Friedman, R. Tillman, and members of the Affective and Translational Neuroscience laboratory and constructive feedback from four anonymous reviewers and K. Rubin. This work was supported by the National Institutes of Health (DA040717, MH107444) and University of Maryland. Authors declare no conflicts of interest.

ETHICAL STANDARDS

The authors assert that all procedures contributing to this work comply with the ethical standards of the relevant national and institutional committees on human experimentation and with the Helsinki Declaration of 1975, as revised in 2008.

DATA SHARING

Raw data have been or will be made available via the National Institute of Mental Health’s RDoC Database ( https://data-archive.nimh.nih.gov/rdocdb ).

1. The mean and dispersion of the present sample is similar to that of unselected individuals drawn from the same university population. For example, exploratory analyses of data collected as part of the University of Maryland Department of Psychology’s on-line survey during the 2015–2018 academic years ( N = 1,596) revealed that among the subset of respondents 18–19 years old, women reported significantly greater social anxiety ( N = 601, M = 46.8, SD = 23.2) than men ( N = 229, M = 40.3, SD = 22.7), t = 3.67, p = .001. When the on-line survey data were adjusted to reflect the percentage of women in the EMA study (51.3%), the resulting weighted distribution ( M = 43.6, Range = 2–122) was similar to the present EMA sample ( M = 41.7, Range = 1–121).

2. For descriptive purposes, depression was assessed using the General Depression subscale of the revised Inventory of Depression and Anxiety Symptoms (IDAS-II) Watson, D., O’Hara, M. W., Naragon-Gainey, K., Koffel, E., Chmielewski, M., Kotov, R., Stasik, S. M. and Ruggero, C. J. (2012) ‘Development and validation of new anxiety and bipolar symptom scales for an expanded version of the IDAS (the IDAS-II)’, Assessment, 19, 399–420.. As expected, levels of depression were somewhat elevated in the present sample ( M = 39.9, SD = 12.8), which corresponds to the 60 th percentile in U.S. normative data Nelson, G. H., O’Hara, M. W. and Watson, D. (2018) ‘National norms for the expanded version of the inventory of depression and anxiety symptoms (IDAS-II)’, J Clin Psychol, 74, 953–968..

3. Similar results were obtained for the model using the log-transformed NA scores as a DV (not reported).

4. The zero-order correlation between self-reported social network size and the proportion of momentary assessments completed in the presence of close companions was r = .29, p < .001.

5. Although the complementary pattern ( elevated social anxiety → fewer confidants → greater solitude ) was evident for a model focused on time spent alone, we refrain from reporting or interpreting it, given the strong dependency between time allocated to close companions vs. solitude. That is, social contexts were mutually exclusive ( Figure 2 ), and most assessments were completed either in the presence of close companions or alone. From this perspective, the results of the ‘alone’ model are almost entirely predictable knowing the results of the ‘close companions’ model.

6. Momentary NA and PA were negatively correlated within momentary assessments ( t = −18.7, b = −.26, SE = .014, p < .001).

7. It also remained significant when controlling for variation in depressive symptoms, indexed using the General Depression subscale of the IDAS-II (Social Anxiety × Close-Alone, t = −2.28, b = −.03, SE = .012, p = .02).

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17 Read the Room! Navigating Social Contexts and Written Texts

Sarah Seeley; Kelly Xu; and Matthew Chen

This chapter is a collaboration between a professor (Sarah Seeley) and two former students (Kelly Xu and Matthew Chen). [1] We begin with a discussion of a key concept: the discourse community. In doing so, we illustrate why it is necessary to examine the social side of communication. This is an invitation for readers to think about the fact that academic communication practices are structured in ways that are actually quite similar to the more familiar communication practices they use on a daily basis. We offer readers a framework for understanding how the social assumptions associated with familiar communicative contexts may be useful in understanding new or unfamiliar contexts.

We use the social media platform TikTok as an extended example as we explore the various criteria that define a discourse community. Xu and Chen then offer examples of how people become competent communicators within the context of new new-to-them scientific discourse communities. They cover topics including learning a “hidden” lexicon, building confidence and independence, and navigating tacit power hierarchies. These experiences reinforce the fact that effective communication requires contextual awareness and that understanding social norms is essential for developing that awareness.

Navigating new communicative contexts can be tricky. This is true of enrolling at a new school, starting a new job, or joining a new friend group. In each case, we need to start by “reading the room.” This means identifying the values and circumstances that shape the new social context so we can communicate confidently and appropriately. But, as we know, what it means to speak or write “appropriately” is not the same in all social contexts. While it may seem like a stretch to compare the task of writing a lab report and that of writing a text message, each context equally requires us to examine what counts as “appropriate.” This chapter offers you tools and examples that should help you examine and respond to the social circumstances that characterize unfamiliar contexts in your own life.

To help guide the process of “reading” whatever “room” you may find yourself in, we will begin with a discussion of an important concept: the discourse community. We will use the social media platform TikTok as an example as we explore the various criteria that define a discourse community. We will then move on to offer two narrative-based examples of how college students have navigated the social challenges involved with becoming productive members of new-to-them scientific discourse communities. Kelly Xu will detail her experiences as a biology student interning at a cancer research institution, and Matthew Chen will discuss his experiences of being a mechanical engineering student doing research in an ecology laboratory. We juxtapose these scientific examples with the TikTok example because we want you, the reader, to understand that academic communication practices are structured in ways that are actually quite similar to the more familiar communication practices you use on a daily basis.

The Discourse Community

Being new to “the room” is an inevitable experience. This happens whenever we start a new class or accept a new job. We have to learn the language and expectations required to succeed in the new situation. The discourse community concept will help you examine, understand, and thus succeed in those new situations. The linguist John Swales first developed a list of criteria for defining discourse communities in his book Genre Analysis (1990). In a more recent (2017) article, he revised these criteria because he wanted to account for the changing nature of communication in our contemporary world. In the following list, we are paraphrasing an article published in the journal Composition Forum , where Swales suggests that discourse communities are defined by the following eight criteria:

• broadly agreed upon sets of goals
• ways of communicating within the group
• member participation that provides information, feedback, and initiates action
• the use of specific formats (genres) for communicating within the group
• the use of specific vocabulary (lexis) for communicating within the group
• a core group of experienced members
• the sense that certain things can be left unsaid
• horizons of expectation

In the next section, we will have a closer look at each of these criteria.

How Can These Criteria be Used to Understand TikTok?

At the time of this writing, TikTok is consistently in the news for its role in circulating conspiracy theories and cultivating extremism (Ovide; Clayton). The community is receiving increasing amounts of attention, and, with the mobile app having been downloaded more than 2 billion times, it offers a timely case study: can TikTok “tick” all the boxes in Swales’ list (Brown; Leskin)?

First, Swales suggests that a discourse community is defined by a broadly agreed upon set of goals. Can we say this is true of the TikTok community as a whole? Probably not. Like most others of its kind, this platform is made up of distinctive interest communities (more on this in a moment). Such divisions make it hard to say that the community is defined by shared goals. For example, it is difficult to claim that the dancer Charli D’Amelio shares the same goals as the people behind the far-right extremist accounts. It is similarly difficult to claim that #CottageCore creators like @speckledhijabi or users posting to #BlackLivesMatter share the same goals as content creators who are cancelled for their use of racist slurs (Jennings). Within this vast social landscape, the only agreed upon goals are very, very broad: producing, circulating, and accessing new and quickly consumable content. As we know, that could mean nearly anything.

What about ways of communicating and participating within the community? Here is where we move onto firmer ground. All social media platforms offer methods for group communication and participation. From rotating trends to “likes” and hashtags, TikTok seems to tick boxes two and three on Swales’ list.

How about specific formats and vocabulary? Tick, tick. TikTok is defined by short video content sharing. Creators can loop or otherwise string together shorter clips to circulate “larger” videos that are up to 60 seconds long. In this way, TikTok builds on the short video format, or genre, that was a staple of its predecessor Musical.ly. Of course, this genre has also been popularized by Vine’s 6 second videos (R.I.P.), and we can also see short form video content sharing in other places, like 15-second Instagram Reels.

Now, does TikTok have a core group of experienced members? Well, yes and no. We cannot answer this question without circling back to our discussion of the first criterion. Recall, we had trouble saying that the TikTok community, as a whole , shares any specific goals. Building on this, we can say that there are experienced or core members, but that they are clustered across different “pockets” of the community. These clusters can be mapped across one important divide: Alt TikTok vs. Straight TikTok. Within these very large categories, content is characterized by wildly different goals and values. So, while there are core members within “sub-communities” across, for example, Alt TikTok, individual users also retain the freedom to shape genres and vocabulary in individualistic and grassroots ways (Sung).

Swales’s seventh criterion relates to the fact that, within a given community, certain things can be left unsaid. Drawing on the work of the linguist Alton Becker, Swales calls this “silential relations.” To understand this concept, we could think about the building abbreviations and program acronyms that are used on our respective campuses. For example, as members of our own campus-based discourse community, we, the writers, know exactly what “COMM+D” means, so we don’t need to spell out the Center for Global Communication and Design. We’re sure there are similar acronyms and abbreviations that define your campus community. We could also think about “silential relations” in terms of slang. From platform-wide slang like “story time” and “duet” to the slang that characterizes TikTok’s niche communities, this box is ticked.

The final criterion relates to something Swales calls a “horizon of expectation.” As he puts it, a discourse community “develops horizons of expectation, defined rhythms of activity, a sense of its history, and value systems for what is good and less good work” (Swales, “Concept”). There are a lot of considerations bundled here. Linking back to the idea that TikTok users generally aim to produce, circulate, and access new and quickly consumable content, we can see, once again, that the TikTok community as a whole is too large to be meaningfully examined in terms of some of these criteria. Numerous histories, value systems, and associated social expectations are observable across TikTok at any given moment. For example, at the time of this writing, the TikTok site indicates that videos categorized under #BLM have received a collective 12.3 billion views. On the other hand, TikTok also had to issue an apology in June 2020 over allegations of censoring this very hashtag (Harris). In other words, TikTok is comprised of a myriad of “rooms” that may need to be “read” quite differently.

As a new(ish) member of a university community, you may be interested to know that, like TikTok, the academic community as a whole is also too large to be meaningfully examined as a singular discourse community. What counts as “good” writing or “successful” communication is going to vary widely across the classes you take in different disciplines. This is because disciplinary goals, genres, languages, and expectations all vary. We must always read the room and respond accordingly. Now that we’ve explored how the discourse community criteria can (and cannot) help us understand TikTok, Kelly Xu and Matthew Chen will apply the same ideas in their stories of learning social norms and gaining authority as new members of scientific discourse communities.

The Lab Experience: Free Trial vs. Full Membership (Kelly)

After interning at a medical oncology lab for two summers, I have experienced being a member, an outsider, and everything in between. In what follows, I will reflect on these experiences using the discourse community framework. As you likely know from your own experiences, the conceptual boundaries of any community are most evident to anyone who is new. Simply not understanding the tacit rules, structure, and lexis of a community can make one feel ostracized as an outsider to the “in group.” In the case I’m about to describe, I entered the lab community as an intern who had minor publications and one year of undergraduate education under my belt. I was certainly under-qualified, and I felt daunted before I even stepped foot in the lab.

In lab settings, educational qualifications underlie all power structures. In other settings, positions may be malleable and accommodating based on pertinent experience, but in the lab, power is clearly defined by education and publication status. The Principal Investigator holds the most authority, followed by MD/PhDs and post-doctoral students, then doctoral students, followed by lab technicians, and finally undergraduate interns. We will also see how this same type of hierarchy structures other lab contexts in the next section, but for now, we should keep in mind: no amount of seniority as an undergraduate can ever allow for a “promotion” to the level of a PI.

Upon receiving my internship offer, I felt like I was infiltrating the company, rather than earning my position. Although I owned a company ID and looked like any other lab member, there were clearly invisible borders that I needed to breach to become an integrated member of the community. I was a long way from understanding the means of participating and communicating that were seemingly obvious to core members of the community. For example, even menial tasks like picking up mice revealed the fact that I was still an outsider. My mentor often said that mice perceive their handler’s emotions and react correspondingly. While she confidently grabbed the base of their tails with ease and they would immediately stop squirming, my hesitant grip allowed the mice to wriggle out with ease.

Lab-specific lexis, or vocabulary, also proved to have a learning curve. I was fascinated by the secret language of abbreviations and terminology that researchers commanded so fluently. I took fastidious notes on the aliases we used for reagents, the tiny modifications made to procedures, etc. But I found that even self-proclaimed mastery of the genres and lexis of this community were insufficient for me to establish a place in the lab. Though I rehearsed the words I heard my colleagues use so expertly, they felt ill-fitting and improper when I used them in practice, akin to a child wearing an oversized suit. More precisely, I didn’t (yet) feel I had the right to use such mature terminology because I still had so little experience. I now realize that the attribute I lacked and yearned for so distinctly was authority. Since gaining authority is a multi-faceted task, I want to discuss two components of this process: autonomy and reputation.

From where I sit now, I see my first summer interning as a “training period” wherein I lacked the agency to plan my own schedule or act without supervision. To put it in Swales’ terms, I could not yet participate independently or initiate my own action. While my days were rigidly structured and scheduled by my mentor, I looked upon the independence of my lab peers with admiration. They were so familiar with the intervals of time they needed to complete aspects of their projects that they could come into work at any time and leave at their leisure. Whereas I was paid hourly and expected to work 9-5, their jobs seem so much more integrated into their lifestyles and tailored to their personal work ethic.  Perhaps more importantly, they were confident enough in their skills to complete tasks within a time window they allotted themselves. Circling back to Swales’ criteria, it is clear that my peers were self-sufficient enough that they were able to recognize and participate in the rhythms of work that support overarching lab goals. Meanwhile, I was given a generous margin of error in everything I did, from booking lab machines times to pipetting reagents from a mastermix. I had to gain my own footing and learn to function as an individual before I could participate as a member of the community and contribute towards its goals.

For an undergraduate with little formal lab training, there is only so much autonomy you can attain since most procedures must be learned under supervision. However, I would like to argue that I did make some progress towards attaining autonomy. At first, I repeatedly executed the same protocol under strict observation. After verifying that I could successfully replicate one protocol, I was invited to apply the same skills (e.g. pipetting or making a gel) to other protocols without supervision. I repeated this process until I was gradually trusted to learn new protocols entirely on my own. Though I still felt restricted by the structure of the lab hierarchy, I came to appreciate these small landmarks of independence as they reminded me of the progress I was making. The better I understood the goals, actions, and lexis of the community, the more my autonomy increased. Hence, personal growth and increased familiarity are the keys to establishing an autonomous position within any discourse community. Whereas my earliest days in the lab felt like a stressful lab practical, I felt like a valuable partner by the end.

I was often scared of asking questions during the first year of my internship. Not only did I lack the confidence to ask a question, but I lacked the basic understanding needed to even form a question. At meetings, I would often stay quiet. This was out of fear that I would ask about something that had already been clearly explained or that I had misinterpreted a figure. Even during my second year, after having completed two rigorous 4000-level biology courses, I still found it challenging to interpret the specifics of my colleagues’ experiments. This, of course, was because I was still developing an understanding of my colleagues’ goals, and I was still in the process of mastering their genres. During the typical lab day, I felt like a nuisance asking what I thought were overly simplistic questions. In fact, I would ask questions in a “bottom-up” manner. I started with asking my undergraduate peers and then worked my way up the ladder if needed because I didn’t want to damage my reputation by annoying the higher-ups. In doing so, I was actually internalizing and taking action within the social structure of the lab.

This social work eventually started to pay off. Another lab member actually consulted me for advice on executing an assay that I commonly performed. I was shocked and honored. This was a recognition of my proficiency and knowledge, and I was elated that, despite my position in the academic hierarchy, my work and reputation preceded me. I had established my colleague’s respect, which went a long way toward making me feel like I was establishing my own authority. Afterwards, I proudly listed “PCR” as a lab skill on my resume; I finally felt confident enough in my technique to claim that I specialized in it. I no longer felt like I was a child donning an ill-fitting lab coat, but began to believe in my own credibility. Thus, practice with the genres and lexis of the lab allowed me to gain confidence as a researcher.

Finally, I took the ultimate test of trust and reputation: the dreaded lab meeting. Lab meetings are notoriously difficult because one is required to present their research progress to-date. In addition, rigorous follow-up questions test your knowledge of every detail of your project and (potentially) highlight every oversight. For example, it was insufficient for me to just know the names of the cell lines I was growing. I also needed to know why they were chosen and be able to discuss the levels of expression for multiple genes in each. To put it in Swales’ terms, the lab meeting is a demonstration of member participation: you provide information, receive feedback, and action is initiated. Though it was incredibly daunting, I was proud to work with my mentor to create the slides I would present as well as field questions from the audience. By being held to the same scrutiny and high standards as my peers, I really felt like I was no longer just an undergraduate intern but recognized as a true researcher.

One of the most important ways to gain membership within a new discourse community is to cultivate your confidence and a sense of belonging. While this involves rather gradual changes in perception, it is something we can all take control of as individual communicators. Ultimately, though, becoming integrated into a discourse community is a more nuanced process than a simple list of criteria might indicate. Learning vocabulary and techniques is merely the beginning of fitting into a discourse community. This is true in the same way that reading a book can’t replace having the actual experience being described. However, the novice communicator can make the integration process less daunting by setting more attainable goals. We can proudly reflect on the landmarks we achieve. In my case, this meant presenting with my mentor during a lab meeting or pausing to feel gratified after a peer had asked me for advice. Upon concluding my two-year internship, I finally felt like I earned a place in my lab community. I have moved beyond the free trial into the highest level of membership I can afford for now.

From Robots to Frog Guts: An Engineer in Ecologist’s Clothes (Matthew)

Going into my second semester of college, I found myself wanting to do something apart from my regimented engineering classes, so I decided to join an ecology lab. My routine of experimenting with circuits and fixing up machines was no more. Instead, I was experimenting with snails and fixing lunch for frogs. Some may ask why I would do this. Through countless hours spent hiking, mountain biking, and camping, the environment has become significant to me. That said, I quickly realized the vast difference between my personal environmental interests and the ecological knowledge these researchers possessed. Similar to the situation described in the previous section, I had some work to do! In order to establish myself within this discourse community, I had to accomplish three main tasks: adapting to their way of communicating, understanding their professional motives, and building their trust. Progressively meeting these goals allowed me to integrate myself into the ecology community in increasingly meaningful ways.

Throughout that first semester, I picked dead invertebrates from a slushy mixture of dirt and sand for eight hours a week. As we saw in the previous section, mundane tasks often serve as a foundation for adjusting to new environments. After weeks spent alone in a windowless lab, churning through one Petri dish of smudge after another, a post-doc invited me to their weekly “journal discussions.” I accepted the invitation immediately and found out later that these meetings were a venue for discussing ecology and environmental science papers.

Going into my first journal meeting, I felt that my contributions were going to be pointless. At first, this fear was confirmed. While the graduate students and postdocs shared their thoughts, I was frantically Googling on my laptop in an attempt to understand them. Though I had read the entire paper front to back, I hadn’t grasped the context behind it. These ecologists came to these discussions with years of experience conducting, writing up, and publishing experiments. Thinking in terms of Swales’ criteria, these years of experience furnished them with a context for understanding the goals of ecological research, for critiquing such research, for decoding ecology genres, and for using ecology vocabulary. I had had none of that.

However, after attending a few of the discussions, I started to understand more. For example, I realized that no one says “standard artificial media 5-salt culture water.” This phrase is ridiculously long and thus shortened to SAM-5S water. Here, we can see the concept of silential relations at play, yet understanding what should be said and what can remain unsaid required more than just learning word definitions. It also required me to understand the ideas within a larger context. For example, through talking with a grad student, I learned the context surrounding the issue of pseudoreplication, which is a situation where one would artificially inflate their sample size by sampling multiple times from a single source. She explained how she would avoid this by setting up 50 individual pools of water with the experimental chemicals and animals. Thus, the experiment would generate true statistical significance, which would make it publishable, thus serving one of the main goals of this discourse community.

In addition, I realized that the journal discussions were always guided by a series of standard questions. Where and when was the paper published? What is the significance of the results? Do they make sense? Are there any discrepancies? Recognizing the format of the discussions and learning more about ecology and scientific genres, I was able to understand the goals of the lab and the context behind their experiments. After attending several journal discussions, I became comfortable speaking my thoughts to the group. I began relating the paper we were discussing to the current research being done in the lab, and making these connections allowed me to get a deeper understanding of the life of an ecologist. Doing this, my comments and questions began sparking a more in-depth discussion, rather than a dead-end conversation. I no longer needed to stress about what to say next or worry about the discussion becoming awkward. Thinking in Swales’ terms, this is when I started to internalize one facet of the community’s horizon of expectations: the value system that defines meaningful (and not-so-meaningful) commentary and critique.

On another occasion, a postdoc started passionately exclaiming how the figures in a paper were way too confusing and complex. This showed me how undoubtedly passionate they are about their work, and how they meticulously critique the textual artifacts that make up their scientific community. It was also relieving to know how even the most experienced in the lab sometimes found figures difficult to interpret too, with the difference being that they are able to back up their critiques with an onslaught of evidence. With each passing journal discussion, I was increasingly able to relate to the ecologists’ work and get to know them better. This is how I started to break free of that “new person” feeling.

While these journal discussions expanded my knowledge of ecology, I also gained insight into how the scientific research community communicates and circulates information. Put differently, these are the actions encompassed by Swales’ second and third criteria. As opposed to engineering, the scientific method for demonstrating results is quite textual. This differs from the more physical nature of engineering, as while I am resizing the fit of a 3D model, the ecologists are meticulously rewriting their manuscripts so as to appease reviewer two. In noting this realization about textual vs. material communication, we can circle back to Swales’ first and fourth criteria. Here we see members of engineering and ecology discourse communities using very different research genres, or formats, to achieve very different goals. And, to put it in more day-to-day terms, I learned that emailing busy ecologists is a nuanced task. These messages had to be short and to the point if I wanted to receive a response in the same week!

At the end of the fall semester working in the lab, I’d learned how these ecologists communicate, how they characterize their passions and goals, and how I fit into the community. These successes paved the way for my next opportunity: a summer internship position. Shifting into the new role, I would continue the work of picking dead invertebrates out of wet dirt. Then, after three weeks, a grad student asked me if I wanted to catch snails from a pond. I was so excited to finally work with an organism that was alive . A little slow, but alive, nonetheless. I picked each snail out from the pond so gently, like they were the last one on earth, and I brought them back to the lab for the graduate student. Upon examining the snails and realizing they were all alive, she told me “good job.” This very brief interaction demonstrated that she regarded snail collection as the most basic of tasks, while I perceived it to be more involved and sophisticated. Essentially, I was the ecologists’ coffee boy, but instead of delivering coffee, I delivered snails!

Nevertheless, after having success with retrieving snails, I was able to communicate to my co-workers that I am capable of successfully carrying out more complex tasks. After around two weeks of snail work, I advanced to a more complex (and quicker!) organism: frogs. I began transporting live (jumping!) frogs from outdoor experiments into the lab. Given the strong possibility that I might lose a frog, or a data point in the eyes of a PhD student, I worked alongside another person. After a week as a member of the frog-catching duo, I was told I could catch them on my own. I was no longer the undergrad who picks dead worms from dirt. I had become the undergrad who catches live frogs out of kiddie pools!

In addition, I started to realize subtleties in the way my colleagues worked, and I developed my own daily routines. I was finally gaining some of that autonomy Kelly Xu discusses in the previous section. For example, each morning I would organize the glassware, check-up on the live animals, collect specific animals, and touch base with the director. At the close of each day, I would start washing glassware and check our chemical inventory. Initially, I did not do any of those things; it was only after talking to them over lunch each day that I came to recognize my colleagues’ workloads and time constraints. So, when I was given a menial task like washing dishes, I worked it into my routine and continued to do it each day, thus freeing up crucial time for my colleagues. By demonstrating that I shared the ecologists’ goals and viewpoints, I was able to gain their trust and integrate myself into their discourse community.

Regardless of the discourse community, gaining membership and authority involves recognizing the social context that surrounds communication. It demands that we read the room. In doing so, we can gain trust through demonstrating our awareness of a community’s goals, genres, and language. As we have seen through our explorations of social media and scientific discourse communities, understanding situated social norms is essential for developing that awareness. Effective communication always requires contextual awareness. This is the social side of communication. In order to understand and be understood, one must learn to read the room. We hope that our examples and discussions have illustrated the intellectual and emotional components of being a novice communicator. Further, we hope you now have the tools to embrace this novice status. It is inevitable that we will all wander into a new room from time to time. Once we cross a new threshold, it is up to us to find knowledge and power there.

Works Cited

Barbaro, Michael. “Cancel Culture, Part 1: Where It Came From.” The Daily , The New York Times, 10 Aug. 2020. The New York Times, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/08/10/podcasts/the-daily/cancel-culture.html . Accessed 10 Aug. 2020.

Becker, Alton L. Beyond Translation: Essays Toward a Modern Philology . University of Michigan Press, 1995.

Brown, Dalvin. “Survey Finds More Than Half of All Americans Back Potential Ban on TikTok.” USA Today , 12 Aug. 2020, https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2020/08/12/harris-poll-survey-americans-tiktok-ban/3353051001/ . Accessed 12 Aug. 2020.

Clayton, James. “TikTok’s Boogaloo Extremism Problem.” BBC News , 2 July 2020, https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-53269361 . Accessed 9 Aug. 2020.

Geertz, Clifford. Local Knowledge: Further Essays in Interpretive Anthropology . Basic Books, 1983.

Gumperz, John J. “The Speech Community.” International Encyclopedia of the Social Sciences , edited by David L. Sills and Robert K. Merton, Macmillan, 1968, pp. 381-86.

—. Language in Social Groups . Stanford University Press, 1971. Harris, Margot.

“TikTok Apologized for the Glitch Affecting the ‘Black Lives Matter’ Hashtag After Accusations of Censorship: ‘We Know This Came at a Painful Time.’” Insider , 1 June 2020, https://www.insider.com/tiktok-apologizes-for-blm-hashtag-glitch-after-censorship-allegations-2020-6 . Accessed 6 Aug. 2020.

Jennings, Rebecca. “This Week in TikTok: The Racism Scandal Among the App’s Top Creators.” Vox , 28 April 2020, https://www.vox.com/the-goods/2020/4/28/21239065/emmuhlu-n-word-mattia-polibio-chase-hudson-tiktok . Accessed 6 Aug. 2020.

Johns, Ann M. “Discourse Communities and Communities of Practice: Membership, Conflict, and Diversity.” Text, Role, and Context: Developing Academic Literacies , Cambridge University Press, 1997, pp. 51-70.

Leskin, Paige. “TikTok Surpasses 2 Billion Downloads and Sets a Record for App Installs in a Single Quarter.” Business Insider , 30 April 2020, https://www.businessinsider.com/tiktok-app-2-billion-downloads-record-setting-q1-sensor-tower-2020-4 . Accessed 9 Aug. 2020.

Luu, Chi. “Cancel Culture is Chaotic Good.” JSTOR Daily , 18 Dec. 2019, https://daily.jstor.org/cancel-culture-is-chaotic-good/ . Accessed 10 Aug. 2020.

Ovide, Shira. “A TikTok Twist on ‘PizzaGate.’” The New York Times , 29 June 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/29/technology/pizzagate-tiktok.html . Accessed 9 Aug. 2020.

Rectenwald, Michael and Lisa Carl. Academic Writing, Real World Topics . Broadview Press, 2015.

Sung, Morgan. “The Stark Divide Between ‘Straight TikTok’ and ‘Alt TikTok.’” Mashable , 21 June 2020, https://mashable.com/article/alt-tiktok-straight-tiktok-queer-punk/ . Accessed 9 Aug. 2020.

Swales, John M. Genre Analysis: English in Academic and Research Settings . Cambridge University Press, 1990.

—. “The Concept of Discourse Community: Some Recent Personal History.” Composition Forum , vol. 37, 2017, https://compositionforum.com/issue/37/swales-retrospective.php .

Teacher Resources for Read the Room! Navigating Social Contexts and Written Texts

Overview and teaching strategies.

John Swales’s discourse community framework has been widely anthologized. It is, of course, something he has updated over time ( Genre ; “Concept”). It also builds on prior work in linguistic anthropology (Gumperz “Speech”; Language ), and it is often understood as being adjacent or complementary to other frameworks relating to the social nature of communication (Geertz; Johns). We raise these points because they offer a good context for how one might teach this chapter in a way that makes the discourse community concept plausible for students who are new(ish) members of academic discourse communities. Learning to read the room is only truly helpful if one can also understand a broader lay of the land, so to speak.

Scholars (in any discipline) develop ideas that retain varying amounts of power and authority over time. They do this within their discourse communities. Because this is an academic context, it means they do so within disciplines and sub-disciplines, which are “rooms” of differing sizes that students may need to learn how to “read.” For example, we could visualize disciplinary relationships as a series of nesting circles. The largest category in figure 1, social science, encompasses many distinct disciplines: anthropology, sociology, political science, etc. The diagram further maps out one tiny corner of the anthropological knowledge-making terrain. What’s more, we could have just as easily selected the biological sciences or the humanities and displayed a similarly small slice of disciplinary relationships within, for example, ecology or media studies.

Our overarching point is this: the smallest subset of academic inquiry pictured within our diagram—paleoanthropology—is a discourse community. It may share features with the larger social science or anthropology discourse communities, but we can still expect that it will have its own unique features. Paleoanthropology is, in effect, its own room, and ought to be read as such. Yet, one can still learn to understand it by applying what they know from inhabiting other rooms: adjacent academic disciplines and subdisciplines, or different workplace or media communities. Similarly, the TikTok section of our chapter offers a pop cultural framework for illustrating how far Swales’ criteria can (and cannot) stretch as we attempt to read a room. We believe this social media discussion can productively set the stage for parallel in-class discussions about academic knowledge production and the boundaries of academic discourse communities.

Tracing the history of an idea—when it appeared, where, and how it’s been used or expanded—is only possible when we can map out these kinds of disciplinary relationships. The powerful ideas tend to be cited, developed, and expanded on by other scholars within and across disciplinary discourse communities. The migration of Swales’ framework out of linguistics and into writing studies is a good example. In order to truly understand an idea, students must go outside of the content to examine the context of its production. These are very important skills. This is especially true for speakers and writers—like your students—who are in the process of becoming members of new academic discourse communities. As we illustrate in our chapter, this novice status is an inevitable social condition.

This chapter may be assigned during a unit focused on discourse communities, but it also presents ideas and prompts discussion that may be productive for transitioning into a unit on conducting academic research and narrowing research questions. In support of these goals, we offer two class activities. The first is specifically focused on helping students develop their understanding of the discourse community concept. The second is more a method for integrating oneself into an academic discourse community— particularly those associated with the humanities and social sciences.

Discourse Communities and Power Struggles: Examining Cancel Culture

This first activity was created for use during class time, so the podcast (audio and transcript options linked below) should be assigned in advance. At that point, class time could be loosely structured in “think, pair, share” terms.

As we know, there are core members within social media “subcommunities,” but individual users also retain the freedom to shape genres and vocabulary in individualistic and grassroots ways. This freedom can be seen across social media outlets, for example: upvoting on Reddit or the general phenomenon of cancel culture.

Today, we will examine cancel culture. The rise of this phenomenon draws attention to an important question on the social media discourse community landscape: How is power distributed? How are people scrambling to redistribute it? What are the implications of our own participation in these power structures?

You listened to (or read) an episode of The Daily called “Cancel Culture, Part 1: Where It Came From” (Barbaro). In it, host Michael Barbaro explores what it means to be canceled and how the whole thing began. Take five minutes to recall the episode, review any notes you made, or skim the transcript. Once you’re up to speed, we will form groups and engage with the discussion questions outlined below. I’ll pop in to hear some of your ideas individually, but you should regard the small group discussion as a platform for contributing to a full class discussion when we come back together toward the end of class.

Discussion Questions

Please begin by reading all the questions that follow. Decide whether you’d like to focus your discussion on Cluster 1 or Cluster 2. Once you make that choice, you should be thinking in discourse community terms. In other words, how might the discourse community concept help us to wade through this messiness and create situational answers to these questions? For example, what can genre and vocabulary tell us about any of these definitions or applications of cancel culture? Are terms like “liberal” or “young person” narrow enough for analyzing cancel culture? Are all “young people” members of the same discourse communities? Recall Swales’ concept of silential relations. How does a sense that certain things can be left unsaid support (or thwart) the politicization or weaponization of cancel culture?

Barbaro presents speech snippets where both Barack Obama and Donald Trump discuss cancel culture. How can cancel culture be labeled as “bad” in two ways that are so very different? Is “canceling” to be avoided because it’s impolite or some kind of cop-out as Obama seems to suggest? Is it to be criticized because the “liberals” are weaponizing it, as Trump suggests? Is it even possible to analyze this phenomenon apolitically?

All types of people exhibit socially unacceptable behavior, whether they are relatively powerful or relatively powerless. Given this, how can we make a distinction between canceling a celebrity and canceling an “average” citizen? How should personal security and loss of income factor into this distinction? Should we even draw a line here? Where does it seem to be drawn currently? In whose minds? Should it be re-drawn?

The Synthesis Grid

The Synthesis Grid activity, as adapted from Rectenwald and Carl, may be enacted during class or used as a formal assignment. It can be productive to assign students to submit a synthesis grid as a supporting document that accompanies, for example, a discourse community analysis, a genre analysis, or a researched argument.

What Is Synthesis?

Synthesis is an important writing practice. It is an especially important rhetorical strategy for learning to write in academic contexts. When writers offer a synthesis, they are combining, blending, or weaving related ideas from different sources.

What Is the Value of a Synthesis Grid?

Producing a synthesis grid offers you an opportunity to take notes in a structured way so you deepen your understanding of a particular topic or question. In effect, a synthesis grid is a material artifact of your research process. It is a record of all the reading and thinking you’ve done as a part of your writing process. Since writing can’t proceed without reading and thinking, it can feel particularly satisfying to document all this “behind the scenes” work. Then, you want to apply that “behind the scenes” work in your writing. For example, offering a synthesis within an academic argument is a very common (and effective!) method for establishing credibility.

How Do You Create a Synthesis Grid?

• You want to begin by settling on a particular topic or concept that will be the subject of your grid. For example, perhaps you want to write about cancel culture. This is a complex and controversial phenomenon with its own history, so starting a synthesis grid may help you to solidify your own ideas on the subject.
• Once you have your topic, you need to locate three or four pieces of writing that deal with the topic. Keeping with the cancel cultruel example, I might decide to start with a podcast transcript—Barbaro—and an article—Luu—then build my grid from there.
• Once you have the topic and some reading material, you want to create the “shell” of the grid. This involves making a series of rows that correspond to the number of readings you want to include. This also involves making a series of columns that correspond to the sub-topics you are interest in learning more about. See table 1 for an example.
• Once you’ve created the shell, you want to continuously add your notes as you move through readings related to your topic. Keep in mind that you won’t know all the sub-topics when you begin this activity. You will fill them in as you learn more. For example, perhaps you were interested in the redistribution of power ot start with, theyn you noticed that writers were often discussing the politicization of cancel culture. That’s a good indicator that you might want to add a column for politicization. Perhaps you then realize many writers are discussing the history of the phenomenom or how the pandemic has shaped the phenomenon. Perhaps you notice many writers discussing a specific social implication—for example, the negativity or destructiveness that is often attributed to cancel culture. If so, you should similarly follow such cues to add additional columns to your grid.

How Do You Use a Synthesis Grid?

Recall, the value of the grid is two-fold. It allows you to document the “backstage” work of reading and thinking, and it assists you in pulling the ideas you developed into the “foreground.” What follows is a sample synthesis that could be derived from this grid (even in though it’s still a work in progress). We can see how the ideas presented by Barbaro and Luu might be woven together to set up a line of inquiry in Table 2.

A Sample Synthesis

While cancel culture may appear to be a relatively new phenomenon, people have long been mobilizing against perceived injustice both on and offline. Both Michael Barbaro and Chi Luu have recently discussed this phenomenon and how it relates to internet language and culture at large. Barbaro and Luu each present the perceived positives and negatives surrounding cancel culture. Barbaro’s podcast episode was released more than six months after Luu’s article was published, and it draws on the words and experiences of politicians, celebrities, and everyday racists as a method for exploring the complexities of this phenomenon. One major question within all of this is how to differentiate between the “cancelation” of a relatively powerful person versus that of a relatively powerless person.

Connecting the Synthesis Grid to the Discourse Community Concept

As we suggest in our chapter, learning to mobilize the discourse community concept is an important method for “reading the room.” Learning how, for example, vocabulary or genre is shaped by social expectations sets student-writers up to understand writing as an audience-driven act. And, learning to map the epistemological landscape of a social debate similarly sets student-writers up to understand academic writing in terms of situated social exigencies.

• This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0) and is subject to the Writing Spaces Terms of Use. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ , email [email protected] , or send a letter to Creative Commons, PO Box 1866, Mountain View, CA 94042, USA. To view the Writing Spaces Terms of Use, visit http://writingspaces.org/terms-of-use . ↵

Read the Room! Navigating Social Contexts and Written Texts Copyright © 2021 by Sarah Seeley; Kelly Xu; and Matthew Chen is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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Understanding Writing Situations

Many of us think of writing as a solitary activity -- something done when we're alone in a quiet place. Yet most of our writing, like other forms of communication -- texting conversations, emails, classroom discussions, meetings, and presentations -- is an intensely social activity. In this guide, you can learn more about the situations in which writers and readers find themselves and the physical, social, cultural, and historical contexts that shape them.

Reading and Writing as Social Acts

Writing is hard work, and it's usually done in a quiet place, away from others. It might seem odd to hear it called a "social act." However, most experienced writers and writing teachers call it just that.

If you think about it carefully, you'll realize that, with a few exceptions (diaries, travel journals, your notes app, and grocery lists among them), most writing activities are intensely social. Even relatively simple writing activities, such as taking a texting message, sending email, or sending a tweet, involve conveying a message to another person as clearly as possible. The writer of a two-word texting message, for instance, ought to consider whether the person reading the message will understand that "call Gail" means call Gail Garcia and not Gail Evans or Gail Chen.

More complex writing activities, such as writing a business proposal or a progress report, require writers to think much more carefully about how their readers will react to what they've written. A memo to a manager outlining reasons why a promotion and a raise are good ideas is clearly shaped by a writer's concerns about his or her readers. Even decisions made by writers of poems, short stories, novels, and plays are affected by what readers know and how they are likely to react.

In much the same way, readers are engaged in a social act. Knowing that you wrote a particular text message, they will contemplate what you most likely meant by the words "call Gail." A manager, reading a memo requesting a promotion and a raise, will take into account his or her perceptions of the writer and what the writer most likely meant by a phrase such as "or else." Similarly, readers of documents ranging from marketing plans to lyric poems to personal letters will read between the lines of those documents based on their knowledge (or the lack thereof) of the writer. Their interpretation of a document, as a result, will be based at least to some degree on something other than the words themselves.

Reading and Writing as Conversation

In some ways, writers' and readers' interactions with each other are like conversations at a party. You've probably wandered around a party, listening in briefly on conversations until you find one you want to join. What you hear in a conversation is filtered through your interests and experiences. And what you say is shaped by a particular purpose (to entertain or inform someone, to ask a question, or perhaps to interest someone in getting together with you at a later time). If you're like most people, you try to avoid repeating things that have already been said and you try to stay on the subject. To do this, you listen to a conversation before adding to it.

This is one of the ways in which writing is most like a conversation. Just as you do at a party, you want to listen (or read) long enough to know what's been said, what people are discussing at the moment, and what they might welcome as a relevant contribution. In other words, you want to be accountable to what's been going on before you add to the conversation (see Accountability, below).

In addition, members of a conversation typically try to create responses that offer something of value to their readers -- something new or interesting, something that helps move the conversation forward (see Value, below). Your decisions about what you might add to a conversation will be based not only on what you've listened to -- or, in the case of writing, what you've read -- but also on your understanding of the needs, interests, values, and beliefs of other members of the conversation (see Considering Your Readers, below).

For these reasons, the relationships between readers and writers can become quite complex. Just as writers compose documents for a wide range of purposes, readers read for a variety of reasons. The degree to which writers can accomplish their purposes depends in large part on the extent to which their document can influence readers to behave or think in certain ways. The degree to which readers find a document useful depends on the extent to which it is consistent with their interests and needs. The document, as a result, becomes the key point of contact between readers and writers - who might live in different times, be separated by thousands of miles, and/or bring radically different experiences to their writing and reading of the document.

Accountability in Writing

Accountability is a key concept in writing, and particularly so in academic writing and research writing. It would be embarrassing to repeat what someone had just said before you joined a conversation. It would be even more embarrassing to be accused of stealing someone's ideas because you hadn't bothered to read what they'd written about an issue. Knowing what's been written about an issue - being an accountable member of a conversation - is the first step toward becoming an effective writer.

Contributing Something of Value

Contributing something of value to a conversation is centrally important in most writing projects. Simply changing the dates on last year's product marketing plan isn't likely to get you a promotion, nor is it likely that summarizing the current state of debate on an environmental policy issue will elicit more than yawns from people who have been closely following the issue. Just as you'll be ignored or even shut down if you make an irrelevant comment at a party, your writing will be ignored if it fails to offer something of value to your readers.

Considering Your Readers

Considering your readers involves attempting to understand what they bring to the conversation -- their knowledge of the issue, their needs and interests, and their values and beliefs. If you are writing a feature article about an Olympic slalom racer for Ski magazine, for example, you'll annoy your readers if you spend a lot of time defining the terms cap skis and sidecut instead of talking about training techniques and race strategies. On the other hand, if you're writing for Parade magazine, a national publication included in many Sunday newspapers, many of your readers (who will be much less familiar with skiing and ski technology than the readers of Ski magazine) are likely to be annoyed if you fail to define those terms. Similarly, providing a detailed history of the Internet will win you little favor from readers of a technical manual for Web server software, but will be of great value to readers of a book covering the development of the World Wide Web.

In a written conversation, you'll have much more time to consider how your readers will react to what you write. As you draft your contribution to the conversation, consider not only how well it will match your readers' knowledge, but also their needs, interests, values, and beliefs. Consider as well their reasons -- or purposes -- for reading what you'll write.

A Social Model of Writing

Models are useful tools for discussing complex concepts. The model discussed in this guide considers the relationships among writers, readers, and texts. Although it can't fully predict the complexities of a specific writing situation, they can help writers understand the general principles that shape those situations.

This model is based on three observations. First, a text may serve as the only point of contact between a reader and writer, particularly when writers are separated by time and distance. Second, texts cannot pass "meaning" transparently and perfectly from writer to reader. Writers seldom write exactly what they mean and readers seldom interpret a writer's words exactly as the writer intended. Third, the factors that affect the attempts of writers and readers to share an understanding of a text include not only their respective purposes, influences, and understanding of each other, but also the physical, social, cultural, and historical contexts in which reading and writing take place.

This model of the writing situation is based on five key questions:

What is the Writer's Purpose?

Every writer has a purpose for writing. In fact, most writers have multiple purposes . A student writing an essay for a class might want to accomplish several things, including completing the particular assignment as required, learning something new, improving writing skills, convincing others to adopt a particular point of view about an issue, and getting a good grade. An employee working on a project st

atus report for a business might want to convey key information to his or her superiors, earn a manager's approval, perform well enough to earn a promotion, and gain valuable experience in project management. Understanding a writer's purposes can help you understand one of the most important aspects of the writing situation. Among other factors, identifying a writer's purposes can help you understand the writer's decisions about the content, structure, and design of a document.

As a writer, understanding your purposes can help you in virtually every aspect of your writing process. Knowing what you want to accomplish will help you select your topic, consider your readers' needs and interests, and choose appropriate evidence to support your points. It will also help you with decisions regarding tone, style, and document design.

What Influences Writers?

Writers will be influenced by a number of factors as they compose a document. Their interests (what they'd like to do) and their needs (what they must do) will affect their decision about choosing a particular topic, the points they make in that document, and the evidence they use to support their points.

Writers' values and beliefs will also influence their document. Writers are likely to choose examples and evidence that reflects their particular perspective on a topic. They will also affect the way they relate to their readers -- whether they adopt a friendly tone, for example.

Writers' knowledge of a particular topic will also affect their work on a document. When writers know a great deal about a topic, they might find it easier to locate appropriate evidence. When writers know relatively little about a topic, in contrast, they'll need to spend much more time searching for, evaluating, and critically reading sources.

Writers--and the writing situations in which they find themselves--are seldom free of requirements and limitations . Requirements are typically associated with an academic or workplace assignment. Common requirements include: length (in words or pages), due date, number and/or type of sources that can be used, organization and format (such as whether to include a title page, works cited list, and so on), documentation style (such as MLA or APA), and intermediate drafts. In addition to these requirements, writers are likely to face certain limitations, such as lack of access to information and lack of time to work on a project.

Reflecting on the requirements and limitations faced by a particular writer can help you understand why particular decisions were made. As a writer, reflecting on your requirements and limitations can help you decide whether a particular decision-such as choice of topic or the inclusion of evidence from a particular type of source-will help or hurt your chances of accomplishing your purposes.

In contrast to requirements and limitations, opportunities expand the possibilities for a writer. Among many other possibilities, opportunities include access to a specialized or particularly good library, personal experience with and knowledge about a topic, access to people who are experts on a particular topic, and access to hardware or software that can help you produce your document (such as desktop publishing software, a good color printer, and Web development software).

What is the Reader's Purpose?

Like writers, readers have purposes. Most readers don't read something unless they see some sort of benefit in doing so. Perhaps they want to be entertained; perhaps they want to learn something new; perhaps they need to review someone's work in order to write a report or assign a grade. Understanding the purposes readers bring to a document can help you anticipate how they will react to a particular document.

As a writer, understanding the purposes of your readers can help you create a more effective document. If you are working on a writing assignment for a class, for example, one of your most important readers will be your instructor. But your instructor will not necessarily be the only reader of your document. Other readers might include your classmates, people who have a professional or personal interest in your topic, or, should your research project be published in print or online, the readers of a particular magazine, journal, or Website. If you are writing in a business or professional setting, your readers might include your supervisor, his or her supervisors, customers, or other people associated with the organization. In addition, it's possible that your readers will include the writers of sources you might use in your document-writers who share your interest in your topic and who might want to respond to what you will eventually write.

What Influences the Reader?

Readers will be influenced by a number of factors as they read a document. Their interest in a particular topic will affect their decision to read -- or not read -- a given document. Similarly, their needs will also affect their willingness to read a document.

Reader's values and beliefs will also influence their reading of a document. Writers who do not take their readers' values and beliefs into account might miss an opportunity to create a more convincing, useful, or acceptable document. Worse, they might offend their readers -- and increase the chances that their readers will not finish the document.

Readers' knowledge of a particular topic will also affect their reading of a document. When writers assume that readers know more about a topic than they actually do, they can create a document that is difficult to understand. When they assume their readers know less than they actually do, they risk creating documents that repeat information readers already know. In both cases, readers are likely to stop reading the document.

What do Writers and Readers Know about Each Other?

One of the most important factors affecting the writing situation is writers' and readers'  representations of each other. When writers understand their readers well -- that is, when they know a fair amount about their readers' purposes and influences -- they're likely to create more successful documents. Similarly, when readers have an accurate understanding of the writer -- his or her purpose, needs, interests, values, beliefs, and knowledge of a topic, among other things -- they are likely to be more successful at interpreting the document in a way that the writer intended.

In many cases, the lack of an accurate representation of readers will result in a "poorly written" document -- that is, a document that doesn't help either the writers or the readers. As you consider writing your document, reflect carefully on what you know about your readers. If you know relatively little about them, or if you're missing important information (such as an understanding of why they would want to read your document or what they would hope to gain from it), consider spending some time learning about them. It will be time well spent.

What is the Context?

The remaining elements of this model of writing as a social activity deal with the setting in which the writing takes place.

Physical context refers to the context in which writers and readers interact with a text. Writers compose texts in a variety of physical settings that can affect what and how they write. For instance, a writer might not be able to do his or her best work in a crowded library or in a noisy corporate cubicle. Similarly, readers might react differently to a text depending on where they read it. Whether a document is read on a crowded bus or train, for instance, rather than in a quiet office, might affect how a reader feels about the text. Even factors such as the lighting available to a reader or the quality of the printer and paper used to create a document can affect the reading of a document.

The community - or social context - to which readers and writers belong can also affect the reading and writing of a document. Writers and readers from the same or similar communities are more likely to communicate effectively with each other via a document than writers and readers who come from different communities. Readers familiar with specific political and social issues, for example, are less likely to expect a writer to define those issues in detail. For instance, readers familiar with violence in American secondary schools will not need to be educated about the issue - they will already know the key points. This reduces the amount of time and effort writers need to devote to providing background information about the issue. Rather than going into detail about the causes and effects of school violence, writers can spend more time developing other aspects of a document.

Cultural context refers to a larger set of similarities and differences among readers. For instance, readers from the American Midwest might find it easier to understand the allusions and metaphors used in a document written by someone from Oregon than those in a document written by someone from Peru or Sri Lanka. Similarly, modern teenagers might find it easier to follow what's being said in a document written one month ago by a high school senior in Milwaukee than a document written in 1897 by a retired railroad engineer from Saskatchewan.

The Role of Context in Shaping Purpose and Constructing Meaning

At best, any model of a writing situation will be inexact. The value of the model discussed in this guide, however, lies not in its attempt to be exact, but in its attempt to call writers' and readers' attention to the factors that can shape their interactions with texts - and, through texts, with each other. Of critical importance in this model is the role played by context-physical, social, and cultural-in shaping the decisions writers make as they compose a text and that readers make as they construct meaning from a text. For writers, context shapes -- some might argue that it actually causes -- the purposes for writing. Moreover, context affects the opportunities, requirements, and limitations that affect the choices writers make as they compose their documents. For readers, context shapes their attempt to construct meaning as they read. Physical context can enhance or diminish their ability to read the document. Social context can affect the extent to which writers and readers share common experiences and expectations about a text. Cultural context will affect the fundamental assumptions, beliefs, and aspirations that they bring to the reading of a text.

It might be tempting to consider the elements of this model -- purposes, influences, representations of readers and writers, and the various levels of context -- as relatively distinct. But the most effective use of this model of writing as a social activity lies in recognizing that these elements are intimately related with each other. As you consider the role that text plays in the attempts of writers and readers to create shared meaning through text, remember that no single element of the model can stand completely separate from the others.

Mangialetti, Tony & Mike Palmquist. (2022). Understanding Writing Situations. Writing@CSU . Colorado State University. https://writing.colostate.edu/guides/guide.cfm?guideid=3

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In This Article Expand or collapse the "in this article" section Social Context of Education

Introduction, democracy and education.

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Social Context of Education by Claire Smrekar , Lydia Bentley LAST REVIEWED: 28 April 2017 LAST MODIFIED: 15 December 2011 DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780199756810-0039

The study of the social context of education explores contemporary issues in education through the lenses of philosophical, political, and sociological theories, concepts, and research traditions. Studies in this field involve the relationship between schools and society, with specific reference to the role of race and ethnicity, social class, and gender in education. The focus often rests on the intersection of schooling and broad social policy, including health, housing, work, and community development. Scholars in this field explore issues of equity, opportunity, and the organization of schooling across an array of school contexts, including domestic and international, traditional public schools, choice programs (e.g., magnet, charter, voucher), and home-based and private schooling. Pertinent questions related to social stratification and social reproduction commonly frame studies in this domain: How do race and class affect the educational experiences of students? Did desegregation contribute to closing the achievement gap? How do neighborhoods coalesce with educational institutions to produce patterns of inequality? How does the organization of schooling (e.g., tracking) shape student outcomes? Broader frameworks in the field probe fundamental questions about the relationship of schools to society: What is the purpose of public education? How do principles of democracy and civility shape contemporary school policies and educational debates? The citations included in this bibliography encompass the core concepts and important research studies related to the social context of education. Some are included because they are seminal works that have shaped the field and the foundational studies that have followed; others are listed here because they reflect the most recent, rigorous, and insightful work in this field. The entries listed here span books, book chapters, peer-reviewed articles, policy reports, and issue briefs. All the citations represent significant contributions to understanding the social context of education.

What is the purpose of public education in a democracy? Tyack 1966 answers this question with a seminal piece on the history of public education. Barber 1992 moves from the historical rationale for public education—creating a civil society—to examine the contradictions and challenges of this education goal in a contemporary democracy filled with consumerism and cynicism. Fuhrman and Lazerson 2005 provides a contemporary context to assess the historical arguments for devising and sustaining a public school system as an engine for producing a civil and free society. For readers interested in philosophical debates and policy dilemmas, Gutmann 1999 underscores the tensions between liberty and civility, the central tenets of a democracy, and the challenges facing educators as efforts are made to reconcile and balance these tensions. Ravitch and Viteritti 2001 complements these works by presenting an edited volume with chapters that span multiple disciplinary lenses through which to consider the power and limitations of public education in a democratic state. How do you apply the principles of democratic education to the formation of student-citizens? Readers interested in this question will find thoughtful analyses and substantive models in Westheimer and Kahne 2004 , related to elementary and secondary contexts, and should refer to Colby, et al. 2003 for a robust discussion of civic engagement in higher education programs and policies. Skocpol, et al. 1999 provides a provocative, deeply theoretical perspective on civic engagement.

Barber, Benjamin R. 1992. An aristocracy of everyone: The politics of education and the future of America . New York: Oxford Univ. Press.

A vision of education as the fount and mainstay of a democratic society. Incorporates themes relating to postmodernism, conservative excess, and community service.

Colby, Anne, Thomas Ehrlich, Elizabeth Beaumont, and Jason Stephens. 2003. Educating citizens: Preparing America’s undergraduates for lives of moral and civic responsibility . San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Describes how some colleges are attempting to shape the moral and civic development of students, explains the nature of this development, articulates the challenges faced in the process, and offers recommendations for future efforts.

Fuhrman, Susan, and Marvin Lazerson, eds. 2005. The public schools . New York: Oxford Univ. Press.

A compilation of essays covering historical, theoretical, political, and pragmatic topics related to democracy and the American public school. Provides a historical frame of reference and discusses matters of citizenship and mechanisms for enhancing democracy through education.

Gutmann, Amy. 1999. Democratic education . Rev. ed. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press.

Defends the cultivation of deliberative skills and virtues necessary for civic education and advocates the principle of shared educational authority among parents, citizens, and educators.

Ravitch, Diane, and Joseph P. Viteritti, eds. 2001. Making good citizens: Education and civil society . New Haven, CT: Yale Univ. Press.

This collection of work targets politics, values, and religion as topics intrinsic to the connection between education and civil society. Includes multidisciplinary perspectives from history, psychology, philosophy, political science, and law.

Skocpol, Theda, and Morris P. Fiorina, eds. 1999. Civic engagement in American democracy . Washington, DC: Brookings Institution.

A compendium of predominantly institutionalist and rational-choice theoretical perspectives on the roots of civic engagement, long-term changes in civic activity, and the need for a more critical analysis of newer forms of civic activism.

Tyack, David. 1966. Forming the national character. Harvard Educational Review 36.1: 29–41.

A historical account of how Jefferson, Rush, and Webster formulated educational theories pertaining to the republicanization of the young nation.

Westheimer, Joel, and Joseph J. Kahne. 2004. What kind of citizen? The politics of educating for democracy. American Educational Research Journal 41.2: 237–269.

DOI: 10.3102/00028312041002237

This article unpacks the concept of good citizenship by drawing on a two-year study of democratic educational programs while exploring the political ramifications of such programs.

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Ch. 1: Social Context and Physical Environment

The first reading presents a general overview of theories concerning the role of social contexts and physical environments in substance use, substance use disorders, and opportunities for prevention or treatment. These are often referred to as sociocultural theories, but that label does not provide sufficient emphasis about the role of environmental factors. Evidence points to many relevant social and environmental factors that play a role, such as:

• Family and family system dynamics
• Peer groups
• School and workplace
• Neighborhood and community
• Policy and enforcement
• National and global forces

In this first chapter you will read about:

• Social systems, the physical environment, and the social ecological model;
• Social norms theory;
• Social structure influences, culture/subculture and deviance theory, the impact of “isms,” and labeling theory; and,
• key terms used in relation to the social context of substance use and addiction.

Social Systems

Anthropologists argue that the use of substances can only be properly understood when placed within a social context: the family, social, school, work, economic, political and religious systems (Hunt & Barker, 2001). An obvious physical environment aspect of context that is important to consider has to do with a person’s access to alcohol or other drugs. In general, the physical environment produces opportunities and obstacles that shape the behavior of people living or functioning in those spaces and places. For example, a person who grows up in a warm southern climate may not have an opportunity to learn snowboarding. Someone living in a dangerous neighborhood may not build outdoor exercise into his or her regular daily routine. And, the nutritional value of a person’s diet is influenced by living in a “food desert” versus in an area where healthful foods are easily accessed and affordable. Specific to our discussion of substance use, we need to consider how difficult or easy it is to gain access to alcohol, tobacco, or other substances in the family home, school, workplace, peer group, or neighborhood.

One set of questions tracked over time in the U.S. national survey of middle and high school students called Monitoring the Future concerns how easy or difficult the students believe it is to obtain various substances. As you can see from Table 1, the 12 th graders believed they had easier access to all of the substances (cigarettes not reported) than did 8 th and 10 th graders. We have no way of knowing for certain if access actually increased with age, only that belief in access increased; however, the belief may be based on reality.

Table 1. Percent of students responding “fairly” or “very” easy to obtain substances, 2016*

*Table created from data presented in Monitoring the Future report for 2016.

Social Ecological Model. The social ecological model presents a framework with great applicability for understanding human development and behavior within social systems and contexts. To consider how the social ecological model might apply to the problems of substance use, misuse, and addiction, we can start with the central sphere that represents the individual person. This innermost sphere contains what we have studied so far in relation to a person’s biological and psychological makeup—the biopsycho components from our earlier course modules. This is what the person brings to any interactions with the social or physical environments in which he or she functions. Next, we look at the many spheres of influence that form that individual’s social ecology: the micro, meso, exo, and macro systems with which individuals interact (see Figure 1). These systems influence us, we influence them, and they influence each other, which explains why there are arrows between the system levels in Figure 1.

Figure 1. Diagram representing social ecological model’s multiple system levels

Microsystem components include those social systems with which we directly interact on a regular basis: partners, immediate family members, close friends and others in our most personal, intimate sphere of daily living.

Within this framework, we can look more closely at theories concerning the mechanisms by which these social ecology elements have their impact, and at evidence concerning these different elements.

Social Norms Theory

Social norms are a key aspect of the social processes involved in substance use—both in terms of initiating use for the first time and in terms of misusing and using to excess. For example, most cultures that accept the use of alcohol also have norms related to the boundaries of acceptable use—when, where, by whom, and how much. Social norms also come into play because a person who believes that everyone else using alcohol or another substance, or at least approves of that substance’s use, is far more likely to use than a person who believes that it is not common or accepted in their social context.

Looking at the Monitoring the Future study results again, we can explore middle and high school students’ level of disapproval toward people who use substances. As you can see, occasional and regular use of substances gains more disapproval than trying it once or twice, and the level of disapproval for marijuana and alcohol use declines among the older 12 th grade students compared to the younger groups of 8 th and 10 th graders (see Table 2). What is interesting to note is that the 12 th graders seem to make a greater distinctions between types of substances than do the younger students: they disapprove more strongly than the younger students about LSD and heroin, and equally strongly about cocaine, but less strongly about alcohol and marijuana.

Table 2. Percent of students disapproving or strongly disapproving of people who…*

Social norms about alcohol and other substance use also tend to be tied to ethnic identity. For example, there exist many drinking-related stereotypes about Irish Americans and Americans with Russian roots. These ethnic stereotypes can have a significant effect on a person’s decisions about drinking and drinking to excess. On the other hand, cultural prohibitions around drinking to the point of intoxication may be strong in a person’s cultural context. This social disapproval of excessive use (misuse) can be a protective factor against substance use becoming a substance use disorder.

Social Structur e Influence Theories.

A number of theories draw from the science of sociology to explain the phenomena of substance use, misuse, and addiction. These theories “view the structural organization of a society, peer group, or subculture as directly responsible for drug use” (Hanson, Ventruelli, & Fleckenstein, 2015, p. 78).

Culture and subculture . Policy is a form of intervention heavily influenced by theories about the origin of the problems to which it is responding. To a large extent, policy also is influenced by a culture’s values and belief systems, such as the philosophy concerning whether the problem of substance use is better addressed through punishment or treatment. Cultural systems are even responsible for defining what is a drug in the first place. For example, in the majority culture of the United States, hallucinogenic substances like peyote are defined as drugs of abuse. However, according to anthropologists, peyote religion among certain Native American groups defines this substance quite differently (Hill, 2013).

Or, consider the argument that fast food has addictive potential—is a fast food burger to be  considered  a drug and the fast food restaurants responsible for causing an addiction like drug trafficking?

Subculture is about groups that form within a larger culture. The values, beliefs, attitudes, and behav iors within the subculture group may complement or contradict those of the larger cultural context. When they are contradictory, deviance theory may come into play. According to deviance theory, a person (or group) elects to engage in behaviors disapproved of by the conventional “majority” culture specifically because of that disapproval. These individuals embrace their deviance identity—the label becomes an important aspect of identity. Why would someone want to belong to a deviant subculture or group? For many people, it is a matter of belonging somewhere, anywhere, being better than belonging nowhere. Participating in deviant behavior seems a small price to pay for admission to the group. For others it is a means of differentiating self from others—particularly from those who represent the conventional culture. For example, it is one way of making clear to yourself and the world that you are your own person, distinct from who your parents are. Having strong prosocial bonds with members of the conventional culture is a protective force against deviance—the extent to which a person desires approval and wishes to avoid disapproval of the people with whom they have these prosocial bonds helps them make choices that conform to convention (Sussman & Ames, 2008).

Consider how social justice concerns and disparities function at the neighborhood and community level. For example, consider the difference between empowered and distressed neighborhoods to defend against the intrusion of illegal drug trafficking and the crime, violence, and exploitation that accompany drug trafficking. Also consider how difficult it becomes in many communities to gain access to evidence-supported prevention or treatment services that are accessible in terms of being affordable, close to home, culturally appropriate, and developmentally (age) appropriate.

What Comes Next?

Now you have been introduced to several theories and models concerning the ways that the physical environment and social contexts might play a role in substance use, misuse, and addiction. Let’s turn our attention to specific arenas where the social world has an impact. This would be the microsystem elements of family and peer group influences. But, let’s not forget the significance of the larger social systems and social institutions that are involved, as well.

SWK 3805: Social Context Theories Copyright © by Dr. Audrey Begun is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

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• Knowledge Base
• How to write an essay introduction | 4 steps & examples

How to Write an Essay Introduction | 4 Steps & Examples

Published on February 4, 2019 by Shona McCombes . Revised on July 23, 2023.

A good introduction paragraph is an essential part of any academic essay . It sets up your argument and tells the reader what to expect.

The main goals of an introduction are to:

• Catch your reader’s attention.
• Give background on your topic.
• Present your thesis statement —the central point of your essay.

This introduction example is taken from our interactive essay example on the history of Braille.

The invention of Braille was a major turning point in the history of disability. The writing system of raised dots used by visually impaired people was developed by Louis Braille in nineteenth-century France. In a society that did not value disabled people in general, blindness was particularly stigmatized, and lack of access to reading and writing was a significant barrier to social participation. The idea of tactile reading was not entirely new, but existing methods based on sighted systems were difficult to learn and use. As the first writing system designed for blind people’s needs, Braille was a groundbreaking new accessibility tool. It not only provided practical benefits, but also helped change the cultural status of blindness. This essay begins by discussing the situation of blind people in nineteenth-century Europe. It then describes the invention of Braille and the gradual process of its acceptance within blind education. Subsequently, it explores the wide-ranging effects of this invention on blind people’s social and cultural lives.

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Table of contents

Step 1: hook your reader, step 2: give background information, step 3: present your thesis statement, step 4: map your essay’s structure, step 5: check and revise, more examples of essay introductions, other interesting articles, frequently asked questions about the essay introduction.

Your first sentence sets the tone for the whole essay, so spend some time on writing an effective hook.

Avoid long, dense sentences—start with something clear, concise and catchy that will spark your reader’s curiosity.

The hook should lead the reader into your essay, giving a sense of the topic you’re writing about and why it’s interesting. Avoid overly broad claims or plain statements of fact.

Examples: Writing a good hook

Take a look at these examples of weak hooks and learn how to improve them.

• Braille was an extremely important invention.
• The invention of Braille was a major turning point in the history of disability.

The first sentence is a dry fact; the second sentence is more interesting, making a bold claim about exactly  why the topic is important.

• The internet is defined as “a global computer network providing a variety of information and communication facilities.”
• The spread of the internet has had a world-changing effect, not least on the world of education.

Avoid using a dictionary definition as your hook, especially if it’s an obvious term that everyone knows. The improved example here is still broad, but it gives us a much clearer sense of what the essay will be about.

• Mary Shelley’s  Frankenstein is a famous book from the nineteenth century.
• Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is often read as a crude cautionary tale about the dangers of scientific advancement.

Instead of just stating a fact that the reader already knows, the improved hook here tells us about the mainstream interpretation of the book, implying that this essay will offer a different interpretation.

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Next, give your reader the context they need to understand your topic and argument. Depending on the subject of your essay, this might include:

• Historical, geographical, or social context
• An outline of the debate you’re addressing
• A summary of relevant theories or research about the topic
• Definitions of key terms

The information here should be broad but clearly focused and relevant to your argument. Don’t give too much detail—you can mention points that you will return to later, but save your evidence and interpretation for the main body of the essay.

How much space you need for background depends on your topic and the scope of your essay. In our Braille example, we take a few sentences to introduce the topic and sketch the social context that the essay will address:

Now it’s time to narrow your focus and show exactly what you want to say about the topic. This is your thesis statement —a sentence or two that sums up your overall argument.

This is the most important part of your introduction. A  good thesis isn’t just a statement of fact, but a claim that requires evidence and explanation.

The goal is to clearly convey your own position in a debate or your central point about a topic.

Particularly in longer essays, it’s helpful to end the introduction by signposting what will be covered in each part. Keep it concise and give your reader a clear sense of the direction your argument will take.

As you research and write, your argument might change focus or direction as you learn more.

For this reason, it’s often a good idea to wait until later in the writing process before you write the introduction paragraph—it can even be the very last thing you write.

When you’ve finished writing the essay body and conclusion , you should return to the introduction and check that it matches the content of the essay.

It’s especially important to make sure your thesis statement accurately represents what you do in the essay. If your argument has gone in a different direction than planned, tweak your thesis statement to match what you actually say.

To polish your writing, you can use something like a paraphrasing tool .

You can use the checklist below to make sure your introduction does everything it’s supposed to.

Checklist: Essay introduction

My first sentence is engaging and relevant.

I have introduced the topic with necessary background information.

I have defined any important terms.

My thesis statement clearly presents my main point or argument.

Everything in the introduction is relevant to the main body of the essay.

You have a strong introduction - now make sure the rest of your essay is just as good.

• Argumentative
• Literary analysis

This introduction to an argumentative essay sets up the debate about the internet and education, and then clearly states the position the essay will argue for.

The spread of the internet has had a world-changing effect, not least on the world of education. The use of the internet in academic contexts is on the rise, and its role in learning is hotly debated. For many teachers who did not grow up with this technology, its effects seem alarming and potentially harmful. This concern, while understandable, is misguided. The negatives of internet use are outweighed by its critical benefits for students and educators—as a uniquely comprehensive and accessible information source; a means of exposure to and engagement with different perspectives; and a highly flexible learning environment.

This introduction to a short expository essay leads into the topic (the invention of the printing press) and states the main point the essay will explain (the effect of this invention on European society).

In many ways, the invention of the printing press marked the end of the Middle Ages. The medieval period in Europe is often remembered as a time of intellectual and political stagnation. Prior to the Renaissance, the average person had very limited access to books and was unlikely to be literate. The invention of the printing press in the 15th century allowed for much less restricted circulation of information in Europe, paving the way for the Reformation.

This introduction to a literary analysis essay , about Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein , starts by describing a simplistic popular view of the story, and then states how the author will give a more complex analysis of the text’s literary devices.

Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is often read as a crude cautionary tale. Arguably the first science fiction novel, its plot can be read as a warning about the dangers of scientific advancement unrestrained by ethical considerations. In this reading, and in popular culture representations of the character as a “mad scientist”, Victor Frankenstein represents the callous, arrogant ambition of modern science. However, far from providing a stable image of the character, Shelley uses shifting narrative perspectives to gradually transform our impression of Frankenstein, portraying him in an increasingly negative light as the novel goes on. While he initially appears to be a naive but sympathetic idealist, after the creature’s narrative Frankenstein begins to resemble—even in his own telling—the thoughtlessly cruel figure the creature represents him as.

If you want to know more about AI tools , college essays , or fallacies make sure to check out some of our other articles with explanations and examples or go directly to our tools!

• Ad hominem fallacy
• Post hoc fallacy
• Appeal to authority fallacy
• False cause fallacy
• Sunk cost fallacy

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Your essay introduction should include three main things, in this order:

• An opening hook to catch the reader’s attention.
• Relevant background information that the reader needs to know.
• A thesis statement that presents your main point or argument.

The length of each part depends on the length and complexity of your essay .

The “hook” is the first sentence of your essay introduction . It should lead the reader into your essay, giving a sense of why it’s interesting.

To write a good hook, avoid overly broad statements or long, dense sentences. Try to start with something clear, concise and catchy that will spark your reader’s curiosity.

A thesis statement is a sentence that sums up the central point of your paper or essay . Everything else you write should relate to this key idea.

The thesis statement is essential in any academic essay or research paper for two main reasons:

• It gives your writing direction and focus.
• It gives the reader a concise summary of your main point.

Without a clear thesis statement, an essay can end up rambling and unfocused, leaving your reader unsure of exactly what you want to say.

The structure of an essay is divided into an introduction that presents your topic and thesis statement , a body containing your in-depth analysis and arguments, and a conclusion wrapping up your ideas.

The structure of the body is flexible, but you should always spend some time thinking about how you can organize your essay to best serve your ideas.

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McCombes, S. (2023, July 23). How to Write an Essay Introduction | 4 Steps & Examples. Scribbr. Retrieved April 9, 2024, from https://www.scribbr.com/academic-essay/introduction/

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Social & Community Context

Social determinants of health (SDOH) are non-medical factors that influence health outcomes. They are the conditions in which people are born, live, learn, work, play, worship, and age, and the wider set of forces and systems shaping the conditions of daily life.

SDOH are grouped by Healthy People 2030 into five key areas. This discussion guide focuses on the area of social and community context . This area refers to the characteristics of these contexts and the connection to how people live, learn, work, and play, and their health and well-being.

Before the Discussion

If you have not already done so, please take the following steps:

• Review the introduction and discussion guide instructions for information on how to use this guide.
• Learn more about SDOH  (e.g., social and community context), key issues, and how people relate to and interact with family, friends, co-workers, and community members (i.e., understanding of your audience ).
• Familiarize yourself with local voluntary organizations active in disaster (VOAD) and the services they provide.
• Create a list of partner government and community-based agencies to invite to your discussion. Use the prework questions to help you decide who to invite. Invitees should include VOAD whose services improve conditions in social and community contexts.
• Decide if you will distribute the prework questions to participants in advance of the activity or answer the questions as a group before the activity. If you opt for the former, ask participants to record their answers and bring them to the activity.

Social and Community Context

Social and community context includes key issues such as cohesion within a community, civic participation, discrimination, conditions in the workplace, and incarceration. These issues can make it difficult or impossible for people to prepare for and respond to an emergency to the best of their abilities.

This discussion guide focuses on the cohesion of a community, particularly social networks and social support. People’s interactions with and connectedness to family, friends, neighbors, co-workers, and others in their networks can affect their health, well-being, and opportunities to prepare for emergencies. For example,

• People experiencing social isolation may find it difficult to build a personal support network.
• People who have experienced discrimination or racism may distrust their local government and its recommendations.
• People from households where English is not the primarily language spoken are more likely to get involved in their community and with neighbors.
• People who have fewer opportunities for civic participation in emergency response organizations, such as Community Emergency Response Team , may find it difficult to build community resilience.

The objectives of this discussion-based activity are to help emergency planners

• better understand how conditions associated with social and community context affect how people prepare for and respond to emergencies.
• identify gaps in emergency planning and partnerships associated with the impacts of social and community context on people’s preparedness for and response to emergencies.
• ideate ways to build new and leverage existing partnerships in the whole community to reduce or remove barriers to personal health preparedness for and response to emergencies.

Just promoting healthy choices and protective actions won’t eliminate the barriers related to SDOH. Public health departments and their partners must act to understand and address conditions of social and community context in their planning and processes.

Scenario Overview

The discussion guides in this series use the scenario of a mass evacuation. Mass evacuations are possible in response to many different types of emergencies, including hurricanes, chemical spills, and wildfires.

An evacuation order may raise questions in the minds of many in the community. Questions like:

• “Am I capable of evacuating on my own?”
• “Are my family members, friends, or others in my network evacuating?”
• “Who in my community can I ask for help (e.g., a ride to the shelter)?”
• Regarding protective actions, “Can I trust the source of the recommendation, and is the action (e.g., evacuation) in my best interest?”

Many people rely on the decision-making of others and information from various sources. It’s not just a matter of following an evacuation order; it’s a matter of the people around us and their influence on our decision-making processes and evacuation behavior.

Please note that neither this scenario nor the discussion questions address all key issues associated with social and community context. Examples and evidence of SDOH impacts and interventions are likely to evolve with additional research and experience.

Lessons from the Field

Review the below key issues and barriers that a mass evacuation might cause members of your community.

Think of past events that caused perceptible preparedness and response challenges in/to your community. Incorporate identified gaps and lessons learned from those events into your discussion. Lived experiences can add depth to your discussion.

Key Issues & Barriers

Your community is under an evacuation order. People’s responses to the order are influenced by their social networks and social support systems.

Some people who experienced past discrimination may not evacuate because they distrust their local government officials.

People with small or less diverse social networks may be less likely to evacuate. For example, first-generation immigrants experience stressors, such as language barriers, differences in community and family dynamics, and new relationships that lack depth or history, which can increase their social isolation. If they do evacuate, they may travel farther than those with a dense and diverse social support system.

As mentioned in the Neighborhood and Built Environment discussion guide, access to reliable transportation is also an issue. If they do evacuate, the social support they need may not be available at their destination.

People with tight-knit communities may not want to evacuate because they are the social support for their community or they will leave their social support system behind. As a result, they may not evacuate and subsequently, be at increased risk of harm or injury from the emergency event.

Discussion Questions

• Has your community conducted a community assessment, such as CASPER? Community Assessment for Public Health Emergency Response (CASPER) is an epidemiologic technique designed to provide public health leaders and emergency managers with household-based information about a community.
• What community-based partners might you work with to conduct a community assessment?
• What organizations are available in your community to reach groups who are socially isolated in ways that put their health and safety at risk during an emergency?
• Do these community-based organizations have continuity of operations plans? How might an emergency or disaster affect their services?
• How can you build public trust within your community? How can you build confidence in your protective action recommendations?
• Who are the trusted messengers (e.g., faith- and community-based leaders) you work with to tailor and share culturally relevant messages and materials?
• Do these plans and procedures include ways to create/provide equitable, accessible, and inclusive spaces/services (e.g., family-friendly spaces )?
• What community- and faith-based organizations can you partner with to improve your organizations’ cultural competence ?
• What civic participation (e.g., volunteer organizations) and community resilience building (e.g., full-scale exercises) opportunities are available to people in your community?
• How might these networks affect decision-making related to evacuation or other protective actions?

After Your Discussion

A lot of useful information should come out of your discussion. Use this information to take steps that better prepare your community. Next steps may include the following:

• Collect written or typed notes and any additional feedback from the note taker and participants. If the meeting is virtual, consider reviewing the transcript for additional insights, if you chose to record the meeting.
• Summarize the discussion and detail any after actions in a written report (optional). A simple follow-up e-mail with highlights of the discussion and action items can ensure these ideas are implemented in future planning and response efforts.
• Stay informed of contributions to the preparedness and response knowledge base and evidence-based resources related to social and community context . Evidence of SDOH impacts in emergency response is likely to evolve with additional research and experience.
• Seek out promising practices (i.e., interventions that include measurable results and report successful outcomes) that have removed or reduced social and community context barriers to people’s preparedness for and response to emergencies. Examples of SDOH interventions are likely to evolve with additional research and experience.

Promising Practice

The San Francisco Fire Department  Neighborhood Emergency Response Team (NERT) is a community-based training program dedicated to a neighbor-helping-neighbor approach. NERT is a free training program for individuals, neighborhood groups, and community-based organizations in San Francisco. Through this program, individuals will learn the basics of personal preparedness and prevention. The training also includes hands-on disaster skills that will help individuals respond to a personal emergency as well as act as members of a neighborhood response team.

The below list of resources is not exhaustive. Neither the inclusion nor the mention of a resource in this discussion guide suggests an endorsement of a group, product, or service by CDC.

• About Social Determinants of Health , CDC
• Engaging Faith-based and Community Organization , U.S. Department of Homeland Security
• HUD Community Resilience Toolkit , U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development
• Loneliness and Social Isolation Linked to Serious Health Conditions , CDC
• Public Health Action Guide: Public Transportation , CDC Foundation
• Public Health Emergency Preparedness and Response Capabilities: National Standards for State, Local, Tribal, and Territorial Public Health , CDC

Exit Notification / Disclaimer Policy

• The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) cannot attest to the accuracy of a non-federal website.
• Linking to a non-federal website does not constitute an endorsement by CDC or any of its employees of the sponsors or the information and products presented on the website.
• You will be subject to the destination website's privacy policy when you follow the link.
• CDC is not responsible for Section 508 compliance (accessibility) on other federal or private website.

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The importance of Context in Literature

June 2, 2016

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Literature is probably one of your hardest VCE subjects. If it’s not, then go you! (please tell me your secrets).

However, if you’re anything like me, then you probably look a bit like this when you begin considering the overall meaning of a text, the author’s views and values, and how any three passages in the text create the meaning.

When I became awash with confusion, like our old pal Ryan Renolds, the first thing I did (after eating a whole block of chocolate), was ensure I understood the context of the text. Without a clear understanding of the context of your text, you cannot fully comprehend the views and values of the author, nor the overall meaning of a text (it’s also part of the criteria for literary perspectives)!

So if you want to be feeling like this after you write a piece for literature:

Consider the following:

AUTHOR’S CONTEXT VS. READER’S CONTEXT 

Austen was hunched over her small writing desk in the village of Chawton during England’s Georgian era as she wrote  Persuasion.  You are more likely reading it in a cozy bed, listening to Taylor Swift and half considering what you’re going to watch on Netflix later. Remember, your current social and cultural context can have a great influence on how you read a text, so it’s always important to imagine the author’s own context – whether this be very similar, or very different from the context of their text. It’s as easy as a Google search!

For a more in-depth look into how authorial intent and context is important in VCE English, read Context and Authorial Intention in VCE English .

SOCIAL CONTEXT

The social context of a text is the way in which the features of the society it is set in impact on its meaning. There are two aspects to social context: the kind of society in which the characters live, and the one in which the author’s text was produced.

Charlotte Brontë’s  Jane Eyre  was set in the same social context she herself lived in. It was one in which women were seen as the lesser sex, there was a great divide between the wealthy and lower class, and strict class boundaries were enforced. All of these societal features are key in determining Brontë’s views on the importance of social inclusion, and her championing of the strength of women. Or just listen to Phoebe:

HISTORICAL CONTEXTS

The historical context of a text is entangled with its social context, as underlying norms and convention are historically specific. The historical context is important to note especially when large changes have occurred between the time the work was produced, and our current day, so it is not assessed by our own concerns alone.

Aeschylus’ Agamemnon was first performed in 458BC, in Ancient Greece, a time vastly different from our own. Therefore, it is important to be aware of how the play was delivered, at the festival of Dionysus as part of a trilogy. Also have an understanding of the myths surrounding the Trojan War as well as those surrounding Agamemnon, Cassandra and Clytemnestra.

CULTURAL CONTEXTS

Culture refers to a particular ‘way of life’, involving religion, race and nationality, as well as things like food, dress code and manners. Furthermore, culture can relate to art, music, writing and literature itself. Cultural context, which is similarly linked with social, historical and ideological context, is especially important to note if the author is attempting to make a comment on an aspect of culture, or the clash of two cultures.

Cross cultural contact between an Indigenous tribe in Western Australia, and the British colonizers of this land, is explored by Kim Scott in his novel  That Deadman Dance.  He reveals aspects of culture largely unknown to current members of Australian society, as well as explores whether assimilation can be seen as a harmonious sign of friendship, or an intrusive loss of culture. The evolution, damage and protection of culture is an important context in this novel, and has a large bearing on the overall meaning of the text, as well as Scott’s views and values.

IDEOLOGICAL CONTEXTS

Ideology refers to the systems of beliefs and ideas that underpin our attitudes and behavior. Such ideology may be valued by society as a whole, or be the basis of conflict. Ideology is a context that is in many ways ‘invisible’. This is because our own is largely internalized and normalized, we act accordingly to our assumptions and social norms.

Many texts explore ideological context, either challenging or championing it. In his play  Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?  Edward Albee challenged perceptions at the time of the family unit, portraying a couple that symbolizes the immense dissatisfaction caused by idealistic portrayals of marriage, and the fallacies of the American Dream. He illuminates how George and Martha escape from meaningless by creating fantasies and illusions, but how these eventually lead to the breakdown of their mental health.

So next time you’re struggling to get started on a literature piece, remember to think deeply about the different aspects of your text’s context!

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• Focused on Developing Interpretations and Close Analysis , both of which you need for your exam
• Covering what it means to ‘interpret a text’, how to breakdown critical essays, different Close Analysis structures and more
• Includes sample A+ essays with EVERY essay annotated and broken down on HOW and WHY past authors achieved A+
• Essays written by multiple authors all scoring 40+ so you can learn different strategies and implement the advice that resonates with you most

2022 Update: Check out our TikTok and YouTube channel for the latest GAT updates and how you can succeed even without study!

Part 1: Why the GAT Matters and How To Use It to Your Advantage

The General Achievement Test (GAT) is a 3 hour assessment based on your general knowledge ranging from English, mathematics and humanity topics. The general vibe seen from the majority of VCE students is that they aren’t really too sure why they have to take part in this ‘exam’ and as a result, most have little care for it. However, the GAT is an important component in the VCE assessment process. Let’s see why:

1. Standardising how teachers grade your SACs between different schools

Have you ever talked to your friend from another school and realised how unfair it was that their SAC length for the same assessment was twice the amount of time you had for your SAC? Or that perhaps they received the English prompt a week prior to the SAC, rather than during the SAC like you did? Well, this type of this discrepancy can be compensated by the GAT as it helps to eliminate any biases from school to school. This means that ultimately, when SAC marks contribute to your overall study score, you can be sure that your grades have been fairly compared to all other VCE students across the state. This also means that as a whole cohort, the students undertaking VCE at your school should all try to do their best because a better outcome will reflect better on the school’s grading system.

2. Ensuring that your exam marks at the end of year reflect your level and skills

All end-of-year papers are checked twice by two different assessors who independently give you a score for your exam. Now if they both give you a similar score then great, your exam has been marked. If not, a third assessor will then look at your exam in order to reach an agreement. Then, there is a last check against your GAT mark. If it so happens that your exam mark is much lower than what your GAT mark anticipated you to obtain – in other words, if you received a high GAT mark which demonstrates your strong skills in English, mathematics, science or humanities depending on the subject in question, then the paper will be reassessed again. So, if you do well in the GAT and receive an excellent score and for some reason you under-perform in the exam, then the GAT mark can help lift up your score. If your GAT mark is relatively low, then it probably can’t help you, despite you receiving an unexpected low exam grade. Thus, the GAT mark will only ever help you, it can never bring your mark down. That’s another reason why you should try to do well.

3. Derived Examination Score (DES)

Some students apply for a DES when they experience hardship during their VCE exam period such as personal trauma or an accident. In such situations, the GAT is compared with their exam mark to see whether or not the student demonstrated their full potential or if they under-performed because of their current situation. Again, if the student received a lower exam mark but has a high GAT score, it can mean that perhaps the student didn’t do as well as they could have, and thus, their grade may be boosted upwards. Many students believe that they are immune to anything happening to them before or during the exams, but you never know. You may as well take advantage of what VCAA is offering you – basically a ticket to a better ATAR if you’re ever in need.

Now knowing all this, it is often said that there is no preparation required for the GAT. Of course, if you are the type who would like to fit in some practice before the real thing, then have a look at the  GAT archive  available on the VCAA website. While you may not need to ‘study’ for the GAT, it is definitely worth knowing how you can best approach the examination in order to maximise your score outcome.

Part 2: How To Perform Well in the GAT (Without Study)

In Part 1 above we discussed why it’s important to aim for your best in the GAT, so now we’ll discuss  how  you can actually go about doing this. As you know, there are two writing components in the GAT – Writing Tasks 1 and 2, as well as 70 multiple choice questions (MCQ). This post will break down both the writing components and offer you handy tips on how you should approach these tasks in order to maximise your GAT score and potentially increase your overall ATAR.

Organising your time:

VCAA suggests 30 minutes for both Writing Tasks 1 and 2 leaving the remainder of your time for 70 multiple choice questions. If you are happy with this approach then by all means go for it. However, considering that English is definitely in your top 4 subjects that contribute significantly to your ATAR, it is worth investing more of your time on the Writing Tasks. Generally, most students spend around 1 minute per multiple choice question which should therefore, only take around 70 minutes to complete the MCQ section. If we bear in mind that some MCQs will be more complex than others, say we dedicate an extra 20 minutes for MCQ, meaning that you should complete the whole MCQ section in around the 90 minutes mark. This means that you can spare an extra 45 minutes for both Writing Tasks, which is definitely worth the investment since you’ll have the chance to write more thoughtful and lengthy pieces. Strategically, this is a good approach for any student studying an English subject – which is well, everyone.

Writing Task 1: 

What is it.

Writing Task 1 usually presents you with one or several images along with an abundance of information about a particular topic – don’t be surprised if you don’t know much or anything in regards to the topic chosen either. Over the past few years, content that has popped up in the GAT includes Mt. Everest, wolves, the ocean and more. Below is an image of what you should expect:

Instructions for Writing Task 1:

'Consider the information on these two pages. Develop a piece of writing presenting the main information in the material. You should not present an argument. Your piece will be judged on:

• how well you organise and present your understanding of the material,

• your ability to communicate the information effectively, and

• how clearly you express yourself.'

What is it really asking you to do?

To write a creative piece utilising the information available in Writing Task 1. When students read the instructions, they find that it is rather vague and therefore, they aren’t too sure on how to tackle the writing piece. The worst thing to do, which unfortunately a lot of students fall into the trap of doing, is to simply write a long-winded essay literally regurgitating the information from the GAT sheet. Instead, in order to demonstrate fantastic organisational skills and ‘communicate the information effectively’, you should aim to create something unique and interesting – for example, for the 2013 GAT on the topic of radios, you could take on a radio host persona or perhaps the persona of someone working behind the scenes at the radio station. This will be an excellent way of executing your writing piece.

Over on my post, Reading My 10/10 Marked CREATIVE GAT Essay | Part 1, I show you exactly how I approached Task One in my trial GAT. I scored a 10/10 and show you my full essay, so I recommend taking a look!

Want to watch this advice? See this video below:

Writing Task 2:

Writing Task 2 consists of four statements on a contentious issue. Some of the issues raised in the past have included: are the elderly wiser than the young?, Who are our heroes?, Whether or not material possessions leads to happiness and more. Below is an example from the 2013 GAT:

Instructions from Writing Task 2:

'Consider the statements below. Based on one or more of the statements, develop a piece of writing presenting your point of view. Your piece of writing will be judged on:

• the extent to which you develop your point of view in a reasonable and convincing way, and

• how effectively you express yourself.'

To write a persuasive piece debating the topic using one or more of the statements to support your opinion. This means that you can either choose to focus on one of the statements and base your entire contention on that one statement, or alternatively, choose two or more statements as a basis for different arguments (if you wanted to write from a more balanced point of view). Options on how to present the piece include: opinion article, speech, blog post, etc. Remember to include language techniques such as rhetorical questions and inclusive language, as this is expected in a persuasive piece. It’s also a good idea to include examples from current affairs, events or people in history, or even your own personal experiences to add some extra flavour to your piece.

Remember that the GAT can only help you improve your VCE mark, it can never bring you down – so make the effort and try your best! Good luck!

How Do I Do Well if I HATE the English Texts That I Am Studying?

I know that exact feeling; the feeling of giving up before it has even started. Some lucky students fall in love at first sight with their texts while some unfortunate students dread having to spend a whole year analysing their texts. If you resonate with the latter, you have probably already given up on English, or maybe you’re trying your best to stay optimistic. English is hard, but what makes it harder is when you know you hate the texts that you are studying, so how can I do well in English if I hate the texts that I have to study? Whether you hate reading and analysing texts or you just hate the specific text that you have to study, here is a guide on how to make studying and reading your texts more enjoyable!

Reading Texts

We’ve all said it before, “I’ll just read it later” or “I’ll read it right before school starts” and in the end, it all leads to the same conclusion of us never actually reading the text and by the time our SACs roll around, we ‘study’ by reading summaries of our texts and try memorising the most popular quotes. 

Do I Really Have To Read the Text?

The bad news is yes, it is highly recommended that you read your texts! (I know it can be tempting to just read chapter summaries but trust me, I have tried writing an essay without reading the text and it went very badly). However, the good news is using LSG’s ideal approach to your English texts , you may only need to read your texts a minimum of three times. In fact, if you make use of your first reading , you probably won’t have to personally read the text again! During this first reading, take your time, don’t try to binge read the entire text in a night as there is a high chance that you will not be following the plot and you’re just reading for the sake of finishing the text. There’s no need to start annotating the text during this first reading as you will most likely have a collective second reading in class where your teacher will go over the whole text in more detail by highlighting significant sections of your text. This first reading is simply for you to familiarise yourself with the text and what you will be handling during the year. However, if you still have trouble understanding your texts, LSG has a plethora of resources such as free text-specific blogs and affordable text guides that you can check out!

How Do I Find the Motivation To Read My Texts?

Some common reasons why we might procrastinate reading our texts are the sheer volume of pages we need to read; having a short attention span and; being a more visual learner. If this is the case, there are many ways to increase your motivation to read or watch your texts!

• If the text is a play (e.g. The Crucible by Arthur Miller ), watch the play while reading the script . Not only will this help you understand the stage directions in the script, but it can also help with understanding the plot if you are a more visual learner. 
• If the text has a film adaptation (e.g. In Cold Blood by Truman Capote or The Dressmaker by Rosalie Ham ), watch the film adaptation first! Knowing major plot twists and spoilers can make reading your text feel faster as you already know what is going to happen. Watching film adaptations can also help allow you to picture the plot easily and help immerse yourself into the setting and the world of the text (however, do take care when doing this as you are only analysing the text you have been allocated, not the adaptations! )
• If the text is a film (e.g. Rear Window by Alfred Hitchcock ), try to find a trailer of the film or find short clips from the film rather than watching the entire movie in one sitting; watching these cuts and suspenseful scenes may spark your curiosity which is likely to increase your interest towards wanting to watch the movie. Scheduling a movie night with friends and family is also a great way to make watching the film more fun. 
• If the text is a collection of poems (e.g. William Wordsworth Poems selected by Seamus Heaney by William Wordsworth ), listen to the poem while reading the poem. Not only will this help you to embody the poet’s mind, but it can also help you recognise the rhyming schemes and rhythm patterns that may not be noticeable at first glance.

Check out How To Recharge Your Motivation Over the School Holidays for more tips!!

How Do I Make Reading My Texts More Enjoyable?

• Create goals: Space it out, we do not want to get burnt out! Organise goals and do not attempt to read the book all within a night! For example, you could aim to read one chapter a day. Not only will this hold you accountable, but it will also make reading less daunting and overwhelming.
• Rewards: Who doesn’t love rewards? Reward yourself after reaching your reading goals, this could be as simple as taking a break after reading or reading a book that you like. 
• Audiobooks: When you don’t feel like physically reading, download audiobooks of your texts and listen to them while you’re commuting or while you’re doing your chores.
• Environment: Create the perfect reading atmosphere! This is quite subjective, however, if you’re struggling to find this niche, here is a step-by-step guide to ‘romanticise’ reading:
• Put your devices away! If you’re opting to read an ebook, you can also turn your notifications off. We do not want to be distracted and procrastinate!
• Find a comfortable place to sit with good lighting.
• If you’re in the mood for a sensory experience, light a scented candle or make your favourite beverage to sip along while you are reading. 
• If it helps, you can pretend that you’re reading at an aesthetic library, or your favourite café, or a serene park…the options are endless. 

Studying Texts

It can be even harder to find the motivation to study for the texts that you hate as you’re probably looking for ways to limit the amount of physical contact you make with the text or ways to save time and study less for English but still do well in the subject.

How Do I Save Time When Reviewing and Writing Notes on My Texts?

Tip 1: write notes based on themes, writing style & characters instead of chronologically .

Often, students will take notes chronologically based on each chapter, however, this is not helpful at all. In your SACs and exam, you will not be writing paragraphs based on each chapter, instead, you will likely be given one of the five types of essay prompts that require an in-depth understanding of the themes, writing style ( such as symbols and motifs ) and characters of the text. Therefore, I recommend writing down notes and quotes based on themes, specific writing techniques and characters.  

For example, before class, you could create a separate notes page on each prominent theme of the text. When your teacher highlights significant sections of the text, you could then write down these notes into the relative theme document. For comparative texts, you can also create a comparison table based on overlapping themes which will allow you to view the comparisons more easily. If you’re a visual learner, colour coding your notes according to different themes or characters can make it easier to find later on when reviewing your notes. If you do this from the start, you will spend less time re-reading the text and organising your notes which will hopefully reduce the amount of time you spend studying. 

Tip 2: Write Down Page Numbers Next to Quotes and Notes

No, you do not have to memorise page numbers for your final exam or SACs, however, writing down page numbers will help you save time when reviewing your notes as you can just flip over to the page rather than having to re-read the text to find the specific quote or notes. It may seem rather annoying having to write down the page numbers all the time, however, your future self will thank you!

How Can I Find the Motivation To Write on the Text That I Hate?

Tip 1: find out what you hate and like about the text.

We all experience writer’s block, especially when we have no passion for the text we are studying. However, assuming you have read the text, you would probably have unique opinions on the text. Firstly, find out what you hate about the text . 

• Do you hate a specific character in the text? Why do you hate this character?
• Do you hate the writing style? What is it about the writing style that you hate?
• Is there a specific theme you felt the text did not address properly?
• Was there a specific scene or part of the text that frustrated you?

Once you find out what you hate about the text, find an essay prompt related to the topic you hate and practice writing an essay about it! Use this as a chance to lowkey rant, discuss or debate about the topic. Not only will this help you develop your inner author voice, but it will also provide you with inspiration to write. On the other hand, you can also find out what you like about the text (hopefully, you don’t hate everything about the text) and practice writing on a topic related to this. For example, I hated studying The Crucible due to the portrayal of women in the text. However, when analysing the text, I realised that the portrayal of women in the text was simply a reflection of the conservative and insular society of Salem which became a theme that I liked discussing. 

Tip 2: Put the Text in Context

Keep in mind that the texts that you have been allocated all have a specific aim and purpose such as serving political commentary about a significant historical event, critiquing a specific characteristic of conservative communities or simply a discussion about human nature. Throughout the text, there will be many literary techniques, characters and events that will be used to bring these significant themes to life. Therefore, regardless of whether you like the plot of the text or not, the themes that you will be studying may be more of interest to you. If this is the case, researching the background and the world of the text may help you gain a deeper understanding of these themes which is likely to increase your motivation to write as you will be able to apply your knowledge about the text such as quotes, characters and events to these themes. 

Tip 3: Utilise Your Strengths

By focusing on your strengths, you are likely to increase your confidence and consequently, your motivation to write! Therefore, if you are an expert at analysing literary techniques, or if you have mastered writing about characters, use these strengths when you are writing. Not only will playing at your strengths make writing less difficult, it may also help overshadow your weaknesses. 

Overall, whether writing essays is your strong suit or not, LSG has many general essay writing tips (for example, check out this guide on essay planning ). I also recommend checking out some of the comprehensive LSG guides such as ​​ How To Write A Killer Text Response and How To Write A Killer Comparative which may give you a head start on writing your essays. 

Unfortunately, there aren’t many choices in English and it is quite likely that you will end up with a text that you dislike. However, it is still possible to do well in English while studying texts you hate! Hopefully, these tips can make reading and studying your texts much more enjoyable and consequently, make your English experience much more pleasant. Endure the pain now and you'll be finished before you know it!

For a detailed guide on Comparative, check out our Ultimate Guide to VCE Comparative.

Why Is the Context Important?

Understanding the context of the texts you are studying is essential if you are to satisfactorily respond to any prompt ( learn about the 5 types of prompts here ). Not only does it provide an insight into the society of the time and their views and values , it also allows for greater awareness of the characters’ motivations, resulting in a richer discussion in your essays. Discussing the context of the texts also makes for an ideal comparison which can be incorporated in the introduction as well as the body paragraphs. Moreover, context paragraphs are a great tool to have up your sleeves, as they can easily be adapted to almost every essay question, a real asset when attempting to write an essay in an hour. 

In this blog post, I will be giving a brief overview of the contexts of the play The Crucible by Arthur Miller and Rosalie Ham’s The Dressmaker . Further down , I have also provided a sample paragraph as an example of a way in which I would go about writing a context paragraph in response to an essay prompt concerning the two texts. Both of these texts are set in fascinating and significant eras of human history so I invite you to conduct your own research after reading this! 

At first glance, the town of Salem, Massachusetts in 1692 and Dungatar, Victoria in 1950s Australia have little in common; however, both towns exist in stifling geographical isolation, allow myopic and parochial outlooks to flourish, and maintain an irrational but overwhelming fear of ‘the other.’ 

The Crucible, Arthur Miller

The Crucible is set in 1692 in Salem. The provincial, conservative town was established by English Puritans who, fearing persecution, fled from a Britain dominated by The Church of England. The first Puritans to arrive in Salem faced brutal conditions, including 'marauding Indians' and living on a 'barbaric frontier' that lay close to the 'dark and threatening…virgin forest' that they believed to be the 'devil’s last preserve'. In order to overcome these challenges, the people of Salem were forced to unify and remain diligent. In order to ensure efficiency, a strict and rigid way of life was adopted, where work and prayer were championed and individual freedoms and pleasures abhorred. Though this harsh way of life did allow the Salemites to stay alive, it forced them to suppress various natural human emotions such as joy and anger, so as to not detract from work and prayer. Further, the town had limited their interaction with the outside world, compelling them to instead be constantly surrounded by each other. This hazardous combination of repression of emotions and interaction with only a small pool of people spurred private jealousies and vengeance within the townspeople, and it is here that the play commences.

The Dressmaker, Rosalie Ham

In contrast, Ham’s novel takes place in 1950s rural Australia, in the fictional town of Dungatar. Despite being set centuries after The Crucible , Dungatar is rife with the same parochialism (great word to use for both texts, referring to a limited/ narrow outlook), resentment and gossip as Salem. The town’s physical isolation - it is surrounded by 'wheat, yellow plains' and seems to be a 'dark blot shimmering on the edge of flatness' - corresponded with their metaphoric isolation from global events, creating an intense fear of ‘the other’. Further, similarly to The Crucible , the stark physical isolation ensures that each individual’s social interactions are limited to the town’s small population, fostering a breeding ground for narrow-mindedness and prejudice. Ham’s description of the way 'the crowd screamed with lust, revenge, joy, hate and elation' after a local football match win reveals the underlying emotions of the town, repressed behind a veneer of respectability and perceived moral propriety. All it takes is a stimulus, which arrives in the form of outcast Tilly Dunnage, to uncover the malicious undertones of the provincial town. 

Example Context Paragraph

During VCE, I tended to use my first paragraph (in response to an essay prompt) as a way to explore the context of the texts I was studying, and relate the context to the essay prompt being addressed ( learn more about the different types of essay prompts here ). In this case, the prompt I have responded to is:

‍ Compare the ways in which The Crucible and The Dressmaker portray divided societies. 

I was able to adapt much of this paragraph below to whatever essay prompts I came across. 

The geographical isolation of rural, parochial towns can breed a kind of myopia amongst inhabitants and promote binary thinking. Salem is situated on the 'edge of wilderness’, with the 'American continent stretching endlessly West’. The 'dark and threatening' forest which ominously surrounds the town is believed to be 'the last place on earth not paying homage to God’, inciting the irrational fear that 'the virgin’s forest was the Devil’s last preserve' (1) . To combat the imminent threat of the 'marauding Indians' upon their arrival in Salem, the Salemites maintained that 'in unity…lay the best promise of safety’, and hence were governed as 'an autocracy by consent' (2) . Similarly, in The Dressmaker , the town of Dungatar 'stretches as far as the silos' and is described as a 'dark blot shimmering on the edge of flatness’. 'The green eye of the oval' is a physical representation of the town’s predilection for prejudice and endorsement of slyly watching others (3) . The stifling insularity experienced by both towns perpetuates a paucity of culture and 'parochial snobbery’, as well as fostering austere social expectations (4) . The totalitarian regime that governed Salem and their 'strict and sombre way of life' conditioned the people of Salem to repress natural human emotions so as to conform to the conservative and rigid values of society. Indeed, Miller’s description of the 'small windowed dark houses struggling against the raw Massachusetts winter' alludes to the Salemites’ dogmatically narrow-minded outlook and their repression of any individuality. Hence, despite the veneer of propriety upheld by Salem’s 'sect of fanatics’, the town is rife with hidden resentments and 'long-held hatreds of neighbours' (5) . Whilst moral respectability and piety conceal the true sentiments of the people of Salem, clothing is the mask for the 'liars, sinners and hypocrites' of Dungatar (6) . Though on the surface the town appears respectable, the true desires of 'the sour people of Dungatar' are revealed through their desire 'to look better than everybody else’. Their lack of connection with the outside world forces their constant interaction with one another and means that 'everybody knows everything about everyone' (7) . Thus, Miller and Ham postulate that geographical isolation inevitably forges unyielding social norms that repress human emotions and pits individuals against each other (8) .

‍ Annotations (1) In these two sentences, I’ve provided the geographical context of Salem.   ‍ (2) My description of the geographical location is followed quickly by describing the town’s beliefs and values, which have a large impact on the social context.  ‍ (3) Here, I’ve used the geographical context as a metaphor to explain the social context of Dungatar. ‍ (4) I’ve described a similarity between the two towns - remember to use lots of meaningful comparisons in all paragraphs ( LSG’s CONVERGENT and DIVERGENT strategy is a useful strategy for this).  ‍ (5) I’ve detailed how the societal expectations and values of the Salemites (the people of Salem) can impact the behaviour of the characters.  ‍ (6) Here, I’ve outlined a subtle difference (or divergence ) between Dungatar and Salem.  ‍ (7) Once again, I’ve related the townspeople’s values and beliefs, as well as the physical context, to their behaviour. ‍ (8) I’ve ended with a meaningful comparison between the intent of the two authors. 

Looking for more? Check out our other blog posts on The Crucible and The Dressmaker :

The Crucible by Arthur Miller

The Dressmaker by Rosalie Ham

Comparing The Crucible and The Dressmaker

1. Don't focus just on ideas and avoid language engagement.

Language engagement is every bit as important as ideas. Sometimes, when you get stuck in philosophical musings, you might find yourself in a place where you're spouting on and on about solipsism or the intrinsic desire for independence in the 19th century Norwegian working class. Literature essays are all about finding balance, and here, that balance means language engagement. Whether you are writing about literary criticism or a passage analysis, you have to be able to support your interpretations with textual evidence.

Often, this requires some creative thinking. You can have a lot of fun with it and the examiners like you to pick up on small details and connect it to a grander scope.

Here's an example from Jane Eyre.

“my eyes seemed as if they had beheld the fount of fruition, and borrowed beams from the lustrous ripple.”

“I was not surprised...to feel...the breathing of a fresh and fragrant breeze...The rooks cawed, and blither birds sang; but nothing was so merry or so musical as my own rejoicing heart.”

In this passage, Jane is rejoicing over her marriage proposal, but readers are led to understand that this may be a false, idealistic dream of hers. Note the patterns of alliteration – the fricative 'f' shifting to the plosive 'b' in “fount of fruition” and “borrowed beams” then again from “fresh and fragrant breeze” to “blither birds”. What could it possibly mean?

Fricatives tend to indicate freedom, whereas plosives tend to indicate an abruptness – a harsh change. Perhaps, Jane's wild, free joy is immediately followed by plosive alliteration so as to illustrate how her happiness is cut short and her dream is a false one – she will attempt to achieve freedom through this romance, but she will be abruptly and unceremoniously prevented from attaining it.

Regardless, in any passage, there are always things to talk about and little language quirks to exploit to figure out an interpretation. Start from these little details, and build out and out until you tackle your big ideas. All of these ideas should be rooted in language.

2. Don't prioritise complicated language over ideas.

Often, when you think that expressive, complicated writing takes priority over ideas in Literature, you tend to end up with flowery material that becomes more convoluted than it is effective. If you are one of those people (I know it's hard) but kill your darlings. Focus on coming up with original ideas, and express them clearly. Cut out redundancies. Be expressive in a way that is natural and in a way where you know that first and foremost, your language is accurate. Don't go around using metaphors purely for the sake of sounding intellectual when you can express something equally eloquently and beautifully with simpler, fluent text.

Remember: this is not to say that you shouldn't be expressive in Literature. In fact, writing style and the ability to write well is a fundamental component to doing well in this subject. It is just vital that you strike the right balance. This is a good lesson to learn sooner rather than later - and you'll be steering into prime territory for the exam.

3. Don't treat Literature like an English essay. Be free!

Good Literature essays generally tend to be more lively and expressive than English essays. Why? Because Literature just doesn't operate under the same criteria, and it shouldn't be treated as such.

Don't feel like putting in an introduction/conclusion? No need! Don't feel like sticking to a TEEL structure? No problem!

Your focus is creating writing that moves along at a natural, expressive pace, moving through textual evidence to broader ideas. You don't have a structure. You don't have a paragraph quota. You have free reign over a lot of how you write your Literature essays – so find out what works for you.

4. Come up with original interpretations and don't stick with popular readings.

Literature is one of very few subjects in the entirety of VCE that rewards original thinking. You don't need to go with the crowd consensus on how to read your text: as long as you have the evidence to support your reading! The examiners will reward complex, creative, and unique ideas. Every passage analysis you write should be approached with a fresh perspective – base your interpretation around the text in front of you, and not a dogmatic set of ideas that you bring with you.

5. Let the text before you provide you with the ideas, don't force your ideas into the text.

By reading literary criticism and expanding the scope of your ideas, you can apply original readings to each set of passages you have. Your essays stand out when they cover new, uncharted territory.

Literature is all about balance. If you can find it in you to balance language engagement, interpretation, and writing style, I'd say you have yourself a pretty good essay.

Remember not to fall into any of the common traps of the subject, and you'll have put yourself on solid footing to become a true literati.

How Genre Works

We’re not supposed to judge a book based on its cover, but for some reason, we just can’t help it. Sure, we may not be able to tell if we’re going to enjoy the book, nor can we tell what exactly it’s about, but we can tell the tone, set our expectations, and most importantly, guess at the genre. Look at these three book covers and note how they perfectly show their genres - Sci-Fi, Horror and Life Drama, respectively. 

Genre is a way of categorising media. We split books, film and music into genres in order to better talk about them and because humans have a strange desire to sort and categorise things. Within whatever medium, genres display certain structures, characters and tropes that audiences expect from that genre . Audiences like to be able to tell the genre of a text because it’s comfortable. If I go to see a superhero movie I expect wacky costumes, cliche dialogue and a final battle scene that the heroes win - were these expectations not to be met, I would likely be a little bit peeved off. 

But why should you care about genre in VCE Literature? It’s not on the study design?  

Well, not explicitly. In each AoS of the study design, you must engage with ‘the ways the literary forms, features and language of texts affect the making of meaning’ , and/or ‘the ideas of a text and the ways in which they are presented’ . Genres are a feature of texts and are one of the ways that a text will present its ideas. Horror is the most notable example of a genre that uses its tropes to send a message - It Follows is a horror where the monster stands in for sexually transmitted disease, Carrie uses horror to show the horrors of high school, Frankenstein is a criticism of those who would ‘play god’. In the Literature study design, the horror genre is represented by Bram Stoker’s 1897 masterpiece, Dracula.  

For an overview of the Literature study design, check out The Ultimate Guide to VCE Literature . 

Dracula + The Gothic

I invite you to think hard about the horror films you’ve seen and to try to place Dracula into our modern view of horror. It’s hard to put Stoker’s vampire on the same stage as the Babadook , Annabelle or even the ‘70s slasher craze. This gives us an incredible opportunity to consider how audiences engaged and continue to engage with genres. In order to analyse genre, it is essential to recognise what the audience’s expectations were of a genre, and how the author has utilised those expectations for their own ends. Let’s consider Dracula in context .

‍ Dracula is a horror novel. But, we usually don’t think about those uptight Victorians reading texts that were designed expressly to scare. The Victorian era was actually one of the golden ages of horror literature though. But, it is distinctly different from our modern understandings of horror as defined by trailblazers like Stephen King. So, why is it different? It is here we must consider the sub-genre. If you have read anything about Dracula , you’ll note that it is referred to as a ‘gothic horror’ . The gothic genre of literature encapsulates some of the 19th century and certainly the Victorian period’s (1837-1901) best literature. Dracula of course belongs to this group, but it blows up around 1818 with Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein . Edgar Allen Poe, with his short stories and poetry, is widely lauded as the ‘Father of American Gothic’, with ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’ published in 1839. Note the dates here. Stoker published Dracula in 1897, a good 79 years after Frankenstein began haunting readers. Which means he had an established and large genre to work with. So, how did Stoker use the gothic in Dracula?

Tropes of the Gothic

1) the gothic monster.

The vampire myth used by Stoker is turned into the quintessential gothic monster. Dracula existed in the Victorian mind alongside Frankestein’s monster, Mr. Hyde, and Poe’s mixture of humans made monstrous and surreal monsters like that in ‘The Masque of the Red Death’. The defining feature of the gothic monster is its role in the story as a representation of something wrong with society, whether it’s increasingly amoral medicinal science, human greed or perverted desire. 

2) The Creepy Castle

The creepy castle doesn’t have to be a castle. It can be a mansion, a university or the graveyards of London. The important thing is that the setting of the gothic novel should always be - by default - terrifying and evoke a sense of danger. You can never get comfortable in Dracula’s castle, nor in Seward’s asylum, and neither can the characters. 

3) Damsel/s in Distress

For sure an outdated trope, but a constant in the gothic. It’s a quick and simple way to show that the innocence of young women is threatened by a malignant force. In Dracula , look to Mina, Lucy and Mrs. Westenra. But what happens when the damsel saves herself?

4) Omens, Portents, Visions

Visions in dreams? Random wild animals escaping from ships? Ships docking with a completely dead crew? Random changes in the weather? You might be dealing with a gothic villain, or going mad. In either case, Renfield, Dracula, Mina and Jonothan all deal with portents and visions. 

And This Is Important Because…

Stoker has followed the predominant tropes of the gothic horror genre. Why is this important for our analysis of Dracula ? The ways in which authors use genre and other stylistic elements like form, voice or plot relate directly to their intentions. If we investigate the particular aspects of Stoker’s use of the gothic, we may better understand the views and values that he is promoting. For instance, let’s take Dracula as the gothic monster. Since the gothic monster is always a way to reflect society back onto itself, how is Stoker doing that? A feminist analysis might take Dracula as a reflection of sexual deviancy, which then ties into his constant threat towards women. A post-colonial analysis might question the foreignness of Dracula, and view him as a part of the intrusiveness of foreigners in English society. Either way, you’re touching on a view or value presented by Stoker, and tying it to an aspect of the gothic genre in a way that conveniently also touches on characterisation. 

Let’s complicate things a little more. The ‘Damsel in Distress’ trope is clearly evident in Dracula , but what view or value is Stoker commenting on by its inclusion? The simplest answer is that, by showing that women cannot save themselves, Stoker is saying that women are inherently weak and need to be saved by men. But this answer isn’t sufficient for a number of reasons. Firstly, what are the women weak to? Is it a physical mismatch between the women and Dracula, keeping in mind that Dracula is also stronger than the novel’s men? Or is it a symbolic weakness to some aspect of Dracula’s character, be it sexuality or magic? Secondly, and more importantly, are all the women victimised by Dracula the same? Well, obviously not. 

It could very well be argued that Stoker is subverting the ‘Damsel in Distress’ trope by actually giving us a woman who is able to be her own saviour (which is actually becoming a trope in itself nowadays!). The dichotomy between Lucy and Mina is a crucial aspect of the text, and the way that Mina’s character doesn’t quite fit into the ‘Damsel in Distress’ archetype is a major interpretative dilemma. By considering the genre tropes, Lucy is clearly a ‘Damsel in Distress’ who cannot save herself and is unduly victimised by Dracula. It can be argued that her implicit promiscuousness is punished through her murder, but in whatever case, she is distressed and must be saved. Mina, however, has an entirely different view of her distresses. Not only does Mina take on a caring role towards Jonothan - in which Jonothan becomes a ‘Master in Distress’ - she actively supports the attempts to save her and kill Dracula. By compiling the journals, letters and newspaper clippings into the epistolary that we the audience are reading, and using herself as a window into Dracula’s mind through their psychic connection, Mina proves to be a means by which to save herself from her distress. So, the question of what Stoker actually thinks about women is still quite open: Lucy is seemingly punished for her character flaws, which indicates a misogynist view of women’s sexuality, but Mina is praised for her use of masculine qualities like leadership and stoicism. Is Stoker saying women should be more masculine? Less masculine and more traditionally feminine? This entire discussion revolves around how and why the ‘Damsel in Distress’ trope is being followed or subverted. 

Using Genre in VCE

Whilst a genre-based analysis (or a structural analysis) can be a fantastic way to open up discussion and leads to important questions about views and values , the way I have presented it may appear to be another useless and long-winded thing you have to try to shove into an essay when you already have to balance so much in Literature! Fear not, because there are a couple of really easy ways to fit genre into essays without taking up loads of space.

Option one is to use a genre trope as the basis of a paragraph. If your essay contention is that…

‍ ‘Stoker presents the dangers of foreign immigration to England at the height of its colonial empire’

…then you can easily write a paragraph discussing that…

‍ ‘Stoker employs the gothic trope of a supernatural monster in Dracula, using this vampire as a stand-in for foreigners in England’.

This paragraph would discuss Dracula’s characterisation, and the settings of Transylvania and London, whilst investigating Stoker’s views on England’s colonialism and race. In a Developing Interpretations or Close Analysis essay, you’ve just touched on several key criteria, including the author’s views and values , your own credible interpretation of the text and how the text presents its messaging (through characterisation and setting). You can do all these things without mentioning genre, but by explicitly using the language of genre analysis you are likely separating yourself from the student next to you - who had a similar idea but described it in a less interesting way. This is the utility of understanding genre, it gives you the words and concepts necessary to improve your writing and interpretation. The ‘Gothic monster’ is an easy way to describe an otherwise GIANT concept.

Another way is to add it to other analyses in passing. Instead of saying “ Dracula presents Lucy and Mina as foils to demonstrate the ways in which modern women’s promiscuity is ultimately harmful”, you can say “the presentation of Lucy and Mina as two ‘damsels in distress’ in dichotomy with each other demonstrates the differing ways in which Victorian women could doom or save themselves” . The latter sentence has not significantly changed the content of the first, still referring to the women’s opposition to each other, but by phrasing it with ‘damsels in distress’ I leave open the possibility of discussing not just Lucy’s promiscuity, but also Mina’s conservative womanhood. 

Finally, you need not even mention genre or its tropes in the essay, just use it as a thinking tool. If you go back through the previous section of this blog, you’ll see just how many questions I am asking about the tropes and ideas I am discussing. By using the trope as a jumping-off point for a series of questions, I can develop a nuanced understanding of multiple views and values and the ways in which they interconnect. Take a trope like the ‘creepy castle’ and ask:

“Why would Stoker put Dracula manor in the text?”

“Because it sets up the ‘otherness’ of Dracula.”

“Why do we need to know that Dracula is the other?” 

“Because he represents a supernatural foreignness that we need to be scared of.”

“Okay, but why is it right at the start, why is it from Jonothan’s perspective?” 

All of these questions offer ways of breaking down the text and they will naturally lead to questions about structure, characterisation and views and values. In doing this, you can start to come up with ways to turn those questions, or the order of those questions into an essay structure. Moreso, this type of questioning is what your teacher, tutors and top-tier Literature students are doing. It is a constant process of asking, answering, reconsidering, reasking and synthesising. And genre is an easy way to start the process. 

1. What are Literary Perspectives?

2. What are you expected to cover? (Literary Perspectives criteria)

3. Approaching the Task 

4. SACs, Exams, and Allocated Marks

5. How to Prepare/Improve?

What are Literary Perspectives?

This is the task that takes the longest time for all lit students to wrap their heads around. Not only is it difficult to understand what a literary perspective is but also what the essay requires you to do, so hopefully this article can help clear it all up for you!

Put simply, literary perspectives are various different lenses used for looking at all texts. Different lenses reveal, highlight and emphasise different notions in each text. To take a simple example, a Marxist might look at ‘The Great Gatsby’ how our capitalistic system underscores the motivations of Gatsby? A feminist might look towards the role of women in the text; are they only supporting characters, or do they challenge traditional gender roles?  Perhaps an experienced literature student might think this is an oversimplification, but it’s a good way to start thinking about perspectives. We will explore a little more of how to integrate and research different literary perspectives in our ‘Approaching the Task’ section.

In short, literary perspectives wants you to consider:

• How does a text change, to the reader and the writer, when we examine it through different backgrounds/perspectives?
• Can we understand the assumptions and ideas about the views and values of the text?

What are you expected to cover/do? (Literary Perspectives Criteria)

1. Structure and Cohesion

The structure of the essay and the task itself is more familiar than the close analysis essay. You respond to a topic (yes, there is only one) and you have a more “typical” essay structure with an introduction, three body paragraphs and a conclusion.

Cohesion comes from how well you can develop your overall argument. The way I like to think about it is: do my paragraphs build/relate to each other or do they have nothing to do with each other? Providing a cohesive argument and interpretation is essential, and not just for literature, this is something that will definitely be enhanced as you continue your literature journey!

2. Develop an overall Interpretation/perspective for each text

This requires a lot of research and critical readings of the wealth of criticism around the text. When you read the text, a few notable themes and ideas should be jumping out at you right away, this will be the springboard into understanding the perspectives around the text. 

For example, in ‘The Great Gatsby’, Gatsby and Buchanan are greedy and money-hungry in a world of excess and economic prosperity. Fitzgerald asks readers to consider the backbone that drives a blind devotion to the accumulation of wealth. This should remind you of Karl Marx and his comments on capitalism and communism which will then open up a large wealth of research on Marxism!

Remember, that whilst VCAA specifies that one must analyse and respond to one underlying literary perspective of the text in Section A of the exam, this isn’t as narrow as you might think. So I lied a little, sunglasses as perspectives might be a bit misleading. Because whilst you can’t wear multiple sunglasses, you can have multiple interpretations that form one perspective. It’s important to remember that what constitutes a perspective is not just one school of thought, it is your understanding, perspective and ideas. Which means that if you want to blend a Marxist and Psychoanalytic perspective, you absolutely can, BUT you need to make sure they are incorporated well together. This is because perspectives and literary ideas don’t exist in a vacuum, they work together, bounce off each other and grow over time. Greed could be something that is perpetuated by a capitalistic, market centered system but it could also be something ingrained in the human psyche. See! You’ve now turned two perspectives into one blended idea, of course it needs a lot of cultivation but you can see how these ideas begin to coexist.  

Furthermore, if you begin to understand how your text through multiple coexisting lenses’, you’ll broaden your horizon so you’ll be ready to approach any topic. In 2017, VCAA gave the topic: “To what extent is Conrad’s Heart of Darkness an indictment of colonialism?”. What happens if you didn’t choose colonialism/post-colonialism as your perspective and chose feminism instead? You would probably be freaking out in the exam. But if you understood that colonialism was motivated by the need for economic dominance (Marxist ideas) or the West’s hunger for power (psychoanalytical notions), the topic isn’t so daunting after all.

In sum, developing an interpretation is a rocky, complex and difficult ride but have patience, it will all pay off in the end. Stick around and we will give you a few tips below on how to interpret and continue to develop your interpretation! PS. Here’s a video that might be helpful if you need the extra advice: What are literary perspectives .

3. Understanding and analysis of the text through textual evidence

This should be self-explanatory at this point; everyone has been taught this since year 7: never say anything if you can’t back it up! It’s easy to get lost in your perspective when your writing, this is just a gentle reminder to never forget to use quotes and actual evidence from the text. Here’s a helpful video on how to incorporate quotes.

4. Control and effectiveness of language

Having control and effective use of language is a criteria present in both sections of Literature (and in English)! I won’t go into too much depth, but this video provides 6 great tips on improving your expression!

Approaching the Task 

So how do you best tackle the exam and the SAC?

Aforementioned, the exam will only give you one topic to respond to and your SACs will do something similar (we’ll get into this later). Here are some tips on handling lit perspectives on the exam and SAC. 

When you first see the topic, there are a few things you can do to help approach the task.

1. Highlight key words!

Again, pretty self-explanatory. It absolutely essential that you respond to the whole topic. It’s so easy to get caught up in the first half of the topic when you see a key word that you like/don’t like. But pay attention to what the topic is actually asking you to do, not just the central theme/idea that is contained within the topic.  

Find all the key close textual examples that you’d like to use. Make sure to choose ones that enhance your overall interpretation. Remember, that just because it isn’t a close analysis essay doesn’t mean you shouldn’t include close textual examples. 

Planning is a very individual task so it’s up to you to find out what works for you, but it is an essential part of the writing process. If you want a coherent interpretation, you need to know where you’re going as you write. If you fail to plan, you plan to fail!

3. Develop/Establish your interpretation in your introduction

By now, you know the importance of establishing a strong interpretation of your text. This needs to be established in your introduction (and that includes all the buzzwords of your interpretation). 

What I mean is, a lot of perspectives have a lot of jargon that is not always easy to read… Part of your job in your introduction is precisely to clarify some of these key jargons, it does not have to be super detailed, just give a simple definition of some of the key terms you are working with.

SACs, Exams, and Allocated Marks

This SAC comprises 50% of Unit 4 and in my opinion, was the most difficult to wrap my head around. The breakdown is as follows:

To simplify, it’s essentially like the literary perspective essay in the final exam; however, you need to “compare and analyse two pieces of literary criticism reflecting different perspectives”. Remember how I mentioned that one perspective can be a mix and blend of two different perspectives? Well this SAC is trying to teach you just that. You’ll be tasked with finding two different perspectives, but that doesn’t mean they have to be opposing at all.  The example from before: “Greed could be something that is perpetuated by a capitalistic, market centered system but it could also be something ingrained in the human psyche” is just one way in which you can take two different pieces of literary criticism reflecting different ideas and bring them together in this SAC.  

This SAC also asks you to research rigorously the literary discourse around the text, so that will be your first starting point. Find what you want to talk about and then figure out how to talk about it!

This may be classified as ‘Section A’ on the exam, but it does not have to be completed first, this is up to you! Each essay in the exam is worth 20 marks and will be double marked. The score that each examiner gives you will be added together, so both your final essays will be out of 40. 

How to Prepare (and Improve!) for your Close Analysis SAC and Exam

Everyone’s heard the phrase “practice makes perfect”, but nobody really tells you how to practice? What does practicing mean in a Lit Perspectives context? Here are a few recommendations and guidelines about how to ACE your next lit perspectives essay:

1. Read and Re-read your text (or re-watch your film)

You’ll have heard this hundreds of times but it’s absolutely essential, who knows, you might change your mind? Meanwhile you can find good quotes you like and potentially spot techniques or language devices you might have missed on the first or even second read! 

Each time you re-read, go in with fresh ideas and perspectives and search for examples that either contradict or support your interpretation. Critical reading is what us lit kids do!

2. Find buzzwords for your text or your perspective

Aforementioned, jargon and buzzwords populate the modern literature discourse for any text and perspective. It’s important that you have a firm grasp of these words and phrases. Here are some examples of a few:

• Communism/capitalism 
• Superstructure
• Institutions

Psychoanalysis:

• The unconscious
• ID, ego and superego

3. Talk to your friends and teachers, bounce ideas off each other!!!

Two minds are better than one. Not revolutionary, but unequivocally true. Whenever you are stuck in a rut, talk to your friends about what you think and maybe they can help challenge your ideas. Don’t be afraid to argue your point and be open to criticism, challenging your ideas will only help refine and enhance it. It’ll also make you consider some ideas you might not have thought about it. 

4. Write specific examples 

This is the same advice for close analysis (and any other essay for that essays). Practice writing doesn’t mean you have to write a full essay every time, this can be both draining for you and your teacher to mark. Plus, most of the time, you’ll make the same mistakes/the feedback will be same throughout the entire essay. Try little snippets of examples, paragraphs or introductions instead. 

5. Utilise all available resources 

Teachers are a hub of intelligence, ask them for questions, advice and feedback. Have a look at online resources including critical articles on your texts (not just lit charts articles). There are a bunch of different articles linked throughout this article but here are a summary of a few more articles written by some very smart LSG tutors!

Breaking down the VCE Literature Exam Criteria

Common Mistakes in VCE Literature

The Dont's of VCE Literature

This blog is part of a series of blogs breaking down the 2023-2027 VCE Literature Study design. For in-depth takes on the study design and the new AoS (Developing Interpretations) check out The Ultimate Guide to VCE Literature and A Guide to Developing Interpretations . 

Here, we’ll take a deep look into the SAC for Unit 3.2: Developing Interpretations. We’ll be using Margaret Atwood’s 1996 Alias Grace to demonstrate parts A and B of the SAC criteria so you can see the thinking process behind developing interpretations. 

‍ The SAC has two parts: 

Part A: An initial interpretation of the text’s views and values within its historical, social and cultural context.

Part B: A written response that compares/interweaves and analyses an initial interpretation with a subsequent interpretation, using a key moment from the text.

Your teacher may decide to do them in two separate SACs, Part A after considering the text, and Part B after considering the supplementary reading. Or they may do them together, having you analyse a passage and answer a question just based on your own understanding of the text, and then continuing that analysis by adding the supplementary reading. 

Understanding Context

Part A of the Developing Interpretations SAC task involves the text’s 'historical, social and cultural context’, so it is imperative we have an understanding of firstly, the author and their world, and the text and its world. 

‍ Alias Grace was published in 1996, close enough to our modern times that we can consider it contemporary literature. On the surface, there is not much to link it directly to the big global events of the 1990s - like the Gulf Wars, the Monica Lewinsky scandal or the uncertainty of the new millennium. Margaret Atwood is Canadian, and the events of Alias Grace also take place in Canada; any criticism of government or cultural issues in the text can then be considered criticisms of Canadian culture, but may also be of Western or Anglo societies at large. It’s also worth keeping in mind Atwood’s track record as a feminist activist who became famous for the feminist intentions in texts like The Handmaid’s Tale (1985) and Cat’s Eye (1988).

The world of Alias Grace is about 150 years prior to the text’s publication. The murder that put Grace in prison occurred in 1843, and Grace died sometime around 1873. Feminism as a socio-political movement did not exist at this time, so any ‘feminist bent’ that Grace or Mary Whitney display is the result of independent dissatisfaction, not the influence of wider cultural forces. The role of psychology is strong in Alias Grace and in the afterword, Atwood notes the increasing academic interest in the mind and subconscious. Whilst we could venture into the specific who’s who of 1850s new world psychological history, it is most important to recognise that there were disparate ideas of how memory is formed and recalled, and that defiant or mentally ill women were often stigmatised and categorised as 'insane', when we would now acknowledge the range of mental health diagnoses and traumatic backgrounds that would better explain certain behaviours. Note also that mental health institutions were tools of a patriarchal system that viewed the internment of women as a means of control over women, regardless of mental illness, leading to the regular and indiscriminate use of procedures like lobotomy or Electro-Convulsive Therapy (ECT) to keep women 'in check'. 

Part A of the SAC: An Initial Interpretation

When forming an interpretation of the text, it is necessary to first decide two things. Firstly, you need to recognise the author’s intention and what you think are the primary views and values . Then, you need to find aspects of the text that support your understanding of the text’s primary meaning.

Of all the concepts and ideas in Alias Grace , two are particularly pertinent and stick out to me as a reader. One is memory , the other is sexuality . There are of course other ideas, but these two were the big ones I noted reading the text. Thinking about what you find interesting or core to the text will help you to form an initial interpretation. Once you have the initial ideas, try to expand them into full sentences. To use memory as our example:

‍ Atwood explores the fallibility and role of memory in our understandings of ourselves and our actions, in particular, noting how people subconsciously decide which memories to keep or forget.

See how meaty this sentence is? Even if I can’t quite touch on all of these ideas in a full essay, I have so much I can talk about that it basically makes it impossible to fall short. Now, I want some aspects of the text that help provide through-lines. By this, I mean that I want a smaller part of the text that helps to exemplify my interpretation and that, preferably, would be evident in a passage analysis. I’m someone who finds structure really interesting in texts, so I look at things like form, genre and plot very closely. Alias Grace is really interesting for its use of ‘primary source’ quotes at the start of sections, as well as the fact it has basically no quotation marks to delineate dialogue. Moreover, the fact that Grace’s narration is first-person and that Jordan’s narration is third-person provides ripe territory for analysis. I need to link this to memory, and put it in a sentence:

‍ Atwood’s use of Grace’s first-person narration without quoted dialogue, thus structuring the plot around her speech and remembering, provides a long-form case study in how the psychological process of remembering helps provide understandings of the self. 

So, just based on my understanding of the context (1850s psychology and its impact on women) and the world of the text, I am able to determine my initial interpretation: that Alias Grace is about memory and forgetting in the face of trauma and an indeterminate sense of self. This idea is displayed in the structure of the text which relies heavily on displaying thought processes. 

Part B of the SAC: The Supplementary Reading

The supplementary reading can be a number of pieces of writing given to you by your teacher. This could be something written by your teacher, an explainer of a literary theory (like Marxism or feminism), or as I’ll be using here, an academic article. Check out our blog on Developing Interpretations which goes into how to read academic articles. 

The article I’ve chosen is Margaret Rogerson’s ‘Reading the Patchworks in Alias Grace’ (1998). At the core of Rogerson’s argument is that the recurring motif of sewing and patchwork is a significant indicator of Grace’s identity and her self-expression and that Atwood uses the symbolism of various quilting patterns to reflect the ambiguity of Grace’s character and our understanding of her (since quilting symbols are heavily subjective). Just based on this brief summary of Rogerson’s interpretation, we can start to see how it is somewhat at odds with my initial interpretation (from Part A) - Rogerson isn’t as concerned with memory and psychology, nor am I concerned with symbolism because I focus on structures and narrative. 

Rogerson’s article doesn’t necessarily disagree with my interpretation, in fact, both exist alongside each other quite nicely. I would phrase Rogerson’s interpretation as 'running parallel' to my own because they don’t always touch on the same ideas. Recognising where the supplementary reading sits in relation to your own interpretation is important because it helps to break down how to respond to its position and enhance your own interpretation. Try to place it on a scale of ‘total disagreement’ to ‘total agreement’. It will probably be somewhere in the middle. 

Self-Reflection and Reinterpretation

Now that I’ve read my supplementary reading and placed it in relation to my initial interpretation, I need to ask myself a few questions, and be honest with myself:

• What new information have I learnt from the reading?
• What ideas/themes/motifs did I initially ignore?
• How do these new ideas and pieces of information challenge my interpretation?
• How do these new ideas and pieces of information support my interpretation?
• Can I find links between the seemingly challenging aspects of the reading and link them to my initial interpretation? 
• Can I link specific aspects of my initial interpretation to the theories and ideas presented in the supplementary reading?

Rogerson’s article contained a lot of ideas and information that I had previously glossed over. Significantly, I learnt that 'quilt patterns [...] appear with their names as section headings throughout the text' (p. 8), a theme I hadn’t noticed. Moreover, Rogerson explains the literary and political significance of quilting and patchwork symbolism, drawing attention to the role it played in women’s lives and the inaccessibility of this symbolism to men. 

Do these new ideas challenge my interpretation? Not really. Do they fully support my interpretation? Not really, BUT, they do provide a new way of thinking about my initial interpretation. I can link the quilting symbolism to the idea of Grace’s narrative style because Rogerson emphasises that when Grace discusses quilting, she is discussing her own life. In addition, Rogerson notes that 'sections of the novel [are] separate patterns that are to be fitted into a whole quilt' (p. 8) so that 'the reader becomes a quilt maker in the process of interpreting the text' (p.9). The concept of the physical book being a ‘quilt’ supports and extends on my understanding of structure, thus allowing me to further investigate how that structure functions. 

The notion of the reader as a ‘quilt maker’ interpreting the text also allows me to consider something else I have ignored in my initial interpretation: self-presentation. I initially took for granted Grace’s investigation into her own mind, and that her novel-length yarn reflects the burgeoning field of psychology. Rogerson emphasises through the quilting work, however, that Grace’s motivations are entirely ambiguous to Jordan, the reader and others, so we have to try to decide if she is actually remembering events, or simply telling a story. At the end of the text, Grace makes her own quilt using cloth given to her or taken from the women of her past, Rogerson posing the question 'does the quilt represent memory, amnesia, or madness?' (p. 21). The result, therefore, is that my initial interpretation does make sense, but with some important new additions to be made. 

‍ Atwood’s Alias Grace investigates how individuals relate to their memories through the use of Grace Marks’ speech and interactions with medical psychology, which intend to force her to remember (1). This process of remembering, however, is simultaneously hindered and deepened by Grace’s presentation of self, which wonders into utter performativity, amnesia, and potentially disingenuous motivations for her continued speech (2). Rogerson emphasises Grace’s relationship with the language of patchwork and how this relationship influences her narrative style and remembering, and thus the reader’s ability to fit separate patterns 'into a whole quilt' (p. 8) (3).

This interpretation is significantly more chunky, but that’s because I’m trying to make the nuance of the argument incredibly clear. The first sentence (1) is a reworded version of my initial interpretation with slightly less detail. The second sentence (2) is an elaboration of my previous interpretation that includes ideas gleaned from Rogerson’s article. The final sentence (3) is a brief summary of Rogerson’s method that introduces her work as well as some extra details about Grace’s story-telling and the analysis of readers’ responses. 

The key to developing interpretations is self-reflection. Constantly question why you think the things you do, and it will force you to reconsider your interpretation. The supplementary reading is to provide you with a way to self-reflect and another interpretation to respond to. I strongly encourage those looking to do exceptionally in developing interpretations to read widely and around the text you’ve been set. Some of those texts for Alias Grace are in the resources section below.

Further Resources

Rogerson, Margaret. ‘Reading the Patchworks in Alias Grace’ The Journal of Commonwealth Literature 33 (1998): 5-22. https://doi.org/10.1177/002200949803300102  

The Ultimate Guide to VCE Literature

VCE Literature Study Design (2023-2027): A Guide to Developing Interpretations

For Alias Grace 

Margaret Atwood’s other texts including: Cat’s Eye , The Handmaid’s Tale , and Oryx and Crake.

Glaspell, Susan. Trifles . 1916. Available here. ‍ A play cited in Rogerson’s article, featuring an accused murderess and a quilt. Sound familiar?

Freud, Sigmund. The Interpretation of Dreams . 1899. Available Via Gutenburg ‍ A very dense text on the psychoanalysis of dreams. Useful for its discussions of symbolism as a signifier of psychology

‍ Atwood cites a number of texts in her acknowledgements (p. 543), the most interesting appear as follows:

Moodie, Susanna. Life in the Clearings . 1853

Crabtree, Adam. From Mesmer to Freud: Magnetic Sleep and the Roots of Psychological Healing . 1993. 

Brandon, Ruth. The Passion for the Occult in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries . 1983. 

With the Literary Perspectives essay can come mild confusion regarding its structure, extent (as well as form) of analysis and differentiability from your standard English text response - which is why I’m here to tell you that this confusion, while inevitable, is easily overcome! A text like Cat on a Hot Tin Roof is rife with complexities in both its narrative features and literary devices, all prime for discussion in your own essay. ‍

Consider the following prompt: “ Discuss the proposition that ‘ Cat on a Hot Tin Roof’ is a condemnation of 1950’s American society.”

Don’t let this prompt’s simple exterior fool you. What it leaves room for - and what the assessor will ultimately be looking for - is the development of your own complex ideas. It is this metamorphosis from the simple to complex that, when evident in your own writing, allows your essay to truly shine. This is obviously applicable to English as well, but where a clear fork in the road lies is in the act of grouping those complex ideas under the umbrella of a specific critical lens (or multiple!).  

For instance, this specific prompt is great in how a diverse range of literary perspectives can be applied to it due to its main subject being 1950s American society. These can include: feminist, psychoanalytical, queer, New Historicist, Marxist, and I’m sure many others!

When faced with a number of critical lenses you can choose from, it’s important to keep in mind the fact that focusing your essay on mainly two or three lenses will ensure it’s more streamlined and therefore easier to both write and read. I know incorporating more lenses as a means of adding variety within your essay is quite tempting, but this is sure to both hinder the depth of your analysis/discussion - which is where marks are ultimately rewarded - and run the risk of disrupting any form of cohesion in your writing. The lenses you choose will ultimately be dependent on the extent of their applicability to the prompt and how comfortable you are with using them (i.e don’t use a Marxist lens if you don’t know how to extensively discuss social classes). The combination of lenses you choose, coupled with your own interpretation, help to inform the development of your unique perspective of the text.

For this prompt, I personally chose to focus on using the critical lenses of New Historicism, psychoanalysis and queer theory. From here, I’m able to ask myself questions catered to each perspective such as “What specific cultural values are examined in COAHTR and how does Williams present them?” and, relating this to the prompt at hand by also asking: “Is this presentation condemnatory?”. The lenses you choose should be interlinked with your arguments and thus your analyses, enabling you to show the assessor you understand that this isn’t an English text response! ‍

Introduction

A frequently asked question regarding the intro of a literary perspectives essay is whether or not to state the critical lens/es you are using. The answer to this is that it’s ultimately up to you! Some important points to consider however are:

• Am I able to include this statement without it sounding janky and disruptive of flow?
• If I were not to include it, am I able to make it clear enough to the assessor from the get-go what perspective/s I am using?

Outside of that, a literary perspectives intro is pretty similar to that of any other essay.  One thing to remember however, especially with COAHTR, is to briefly explain certain significant concepts you choose to mention. A good example of this is the American Dream - demonstrating that you understand what it is at its core via a brief explanation in your intro is going to leave a far better impression on the assessor than not elaborating on it at all.

See mine below:

“Defined by its moral incongruity against socially upheld conservative values, Tennessee Williams’ play Cat on a Hot Tin Roof illuminates the debilitative effects of subscription to a belief system entrenched in immorality. By highlighting the ways in which values such as heteronormativity and the American Dream — deemed synonymous with “equal opportunity” — serve only as obstructions to genuine human connection, Williams underpins both his condemnation of such mores and, therefore, the eminent human struggle to attain true happiness."

As you can see, I personally chose not to explicitly state what critical lenses I was using in my essay. However, I did make sure to include certain words and phrases commonly associated with the critical lenses they represent.

For example:

• New Historicism: “socially upheld conservative values”, “belief system”, “values such as heteronormativity and the American Dream”
• Psychoanalytical: “moral incongruity”, “human connection/struggle to attain true happiness”
• Queer theory: “heteronormativity”

This allows me to inform the assessor of what lenses I'm using in spite of an absent explicit statement. It’s also far more efficient in this case than having to use the janky phrase “Under the critical lenses of New Historicism, psychoanalysis and queer theory…”.

Body paragraphs:

As I'm sure you already know by now, Literature grants you a lot more freedom than English in terms of structure - and this is especially applicable to the body of your essay! It's important however to find a balance between what structure you’re most comfortable writing with and what’s going to impress the assessor (as opposed to abusing this freedom and floundering about with zero cohesion).

What I personally tend to be comfortable doing is loosely following a TEEL structure, while spicing it up a little by switching around the order here and there.  This is especially evident in my first body paragraph below for the aforementioned prompt, in which I begin with some passage analysis rather than your typical topic sentence:

“Positioning the audience within an American plantation home’s “bed-sitting-room”, Williams immediately envelops the play’s moral foreground in domesticity and the conservative mores of 1950s American society that serve to define such an atmosphere. It being the bedroom of heterosexual couple Brick and Maggie evinces the nature of their exchanges as demonstrative of the morally debilitating effects of the values upheld by the society in which they live — illuminating Williams’ intention to present social mores as obstructive of genuine human connection. Such an intention is foregrounded by the disparity that exists between the external and internal; that is, the socially upheld status of Brick and Maggie’s heterosexual relationship — exempt from subjection to social “disgust” — and the “mendacious” reality of their marriage in its failure to provide either individual with the same sense of primordial wholeness Brick finds in his “clean”, “pure” and “true” homosocial relationship with Skipper. From the outset of the play, heteronormative values are debased as Williams subverts the domestically epitomised dynamic between husband and wife into an embodiment of the inhumane. Maggie is likened to a “priest delivering a liturgical chant”, her lines interspersed with “wordless singing” — alluding to her overly performative nature that compromises the genuineness of human connection. Brick’s visual absence during the play’s opening and his “masked indifference”, too, further undermine the social perception of heterosexuality as the pinnacle of love as it is this reticence that exemplifies the absence of happiness found in their marriage. This sense of disconnection, wherein “living with someone you love can be lonelier — than living entirely alone”, forces Maggie to navigate their relationship through the reductive mode of a “game” wherein it is only by detecting “a sign of nerves in a player on the defensive” that she can attempt to derive genuine emotion from her husband. To reduce human connection to a set of manoeuvrable tactics punctuated only by “the click of mallets” is an act portrayed by Williams as propagative of immorality, vehemently contrasting the reconciliation of the divided self afforded to Brick by the “one, great true thing” in his life: friendship with Skipper. By making the audience privy to the inhumanity lying at the helm of 1950s American social mores, Williams thus presents his scathing critique of such a system, reflecting its capacity for obstructing human connection and therefore the futility of conforming to its standards.”

A key feature of this paragraph is the nature of my analysis - it is, essentially, very similar to what you’d find in a passage analysis essay. It’s important to note that the skills you’ve learnt for the latter can be easily implemented in a literary perspectives essay and is often what allows it to truly stand out! It also forces you to frequently reference the text with quotes in the same way you would in a passage analysis essay, which is glorious in any assessor’s eyes.

With “zooming in” on certain passages in the text (think analysing literary devices, setting, syntax, etc.) however must also follow “zooming out” and evaluating their overall meaning, especially in relation to their significance to the prompt.

A concise example of “zooming in and out” from the previous paragraph can be seen below:

“ Maggie is likened to a “priest delivering a liturgical chant”, her lines interspersed with “wordless singing” — alluding to her overly performative nature that compromises the genuineness of human connection. ”

Below is another example from a different body paragraph for the same essay:

“ Hateful figures transformed into animalistic grotesques, the children of Mae and Gooper are depicted as “no-neck monsters” with “dawg’s names”, with the “fat old body” of Big Mama herself alternating in appearance from “an old bulldog” to a “charging rhino”. Here the moral degradation of a society so heavily reliant on the atomisation of its individuals is made most conspicuous, with Big Daddy’s semblance to a large animal who “pants and wheezes and sniffs” serving as a further testament to such a notion.”

Conclusion:

This is yet another portion of your essay granted freedom by the nature of VCE Literature, so whether or not you choose to intertwine it with your last body paragraph or separate it completely is entirely up to you. What you choose to emphasise in your conclusion is also very similar to that of any other essay as the main focus is to hammer home your interpretation of the text in relation to the prompt!

See my example below:

“Williams, by presenting 1950’s American society as both propagative of atomisation and obstructive of innate morality, ultimately highlights the futility that lies in assimilating to such a belief system as a means of attaining true happiness. The pressure to subscribe to morally reductive values wherein any remnants of the innate are wholly ignored only further shrouds the possibility of happiness at all, and it is here where Williams’ portrayal of the human struggle to attain this ideal is made most conspicuous.”

Imagine a friend tells you eerie accounts of her witnessing a ghostly presence in her home. You scoff and condescendingly humour her. But as her stories begin to manifest itself in her gaunt appearance, you alarmingly notice how she truly believes in the apparitions she recounts. You begin to doubt her sanity, you begin to doubt the certainty with which you dismissed her supernatural visions and now, you begin to doubt yourself. THE SUSPENSE BUILDS.

But let’s say this friend filmed the ghostly apparitions and showed them to you. Sure – the evidence of this ghost is frighteningly scary. But the suspense that was built in the doubt, uncertainty and ambiguity of your friend’s tale is now lost. The ghosts caught in film acts as another eyewitness and another medium to validate your friend’s narrative. Your friend is no longer the only person who sees these ghosts, shattering all doubt within you of the ghost’s existence. THE SUSPENSE – is gone.

Notice how the form and genre of the spoken word in the first example was meaningful in its the effect on the reader? But when the form changed to a film, the meaningful suspense and ambiguity that was unique and crucial in the original text,  changed , and was no longer as pronounced. Yes – the film itself may be terrifying. But the very doubt and suspense around not knowing if your friend was a lunatic for seeing ghosts or if she was telling the truth all contributes to the meaning derived from the form of the ‘text’ in an unreliable first person narrative. This is the crux of adaptations and transformations, and what you need to identify and analyse –  how the meaning is changed/altered when the form of the text is changed .

Here are 7 lucky tips for how to tackle the SAC:

• Identify the unique  conventions  in the construction of the original text – characterisation, genre, tone, style, structure, point of view/narration (or any devices employed in constructing the text e.g. cinematic devices in a film such as camera angles, framing, lighting, costumes, interior/exterior settings, sound)
• Now do step 1 with the adapted/transformed text
• How do the two text forms  differ ? How are they the  same ? However, be sure you do not simply compare and contrast. The most crucial step is what  meaning  can be derived from the similarities and differences?  How does the meaning change?
• Note  additions and omissions  (and even silences) – do they change how readers/viewers perceive the narrative and alter your opinions and perceptions of the text?
• Historical context and setting  – what significance does the context have on the narrative? Has the adaptation/transformation been re-contextualised? Does that alter the meaning of the original text?
• How does the change in form  impact you as the reader/viewer ? Analyse your own reactions and feelings towards each text form. Do you sympathise with a character more in the original text? How are we positioned to feel this way? Why do you lack the same level of sympathy for the adapted/transformed text?
• Incorporate pertinent  quotations  from both forms of text to substantiate and support your ideas and key points.

Final questions to ponder

Most importantly is to share your  original  interpretation of what meaning and significance you can extract from the text, and how  you believe  it changes once the form alters.

What makes the text in its original form interesting or unique?

Is that quality captured in its adaptation/transformation?

As always with Literature, this task is designed for you to critically analyse and actively engage with the text, understanding its nuances inside and out in order to decipher its meaning. Be individual in comparing and contrasting the two texts – avoid the obvious similarities/differences everyone in your class will also notice. It is the insightful analysis of the  subtleties  of how  meaning is altered  that will help you stand out!

When it comes to VCE Literature, ‘Literary Perspectives’ is a major component of your learning and exams. If you’re studying any of the Shakespearian texts, the idea of using different ‘lenses’ to interpret 400-year-old plays seems silly and is a difficult task to approach. So today, I’m writing a plan for a Literary Perspectives essay on Shakespeare’s  Othello . The question we are looking at is:

In Shakespeare’s  Othello,  Venetian society is depicted as unwelcoming to the ‘Other’. To what extent do you agree?

Breaking-it-Down

So what does this question mean? Well let’s first look at the keywords, and what each means.

“Venetian Society” -This is the group of people depicted in  Othello . Whilst some characters like Cassio and Othello are from other city-states, they adhere to the norms and traditions of the Venetians, who live in Venice, Italy. 

“Unwelcoming” - In my essay, I consider “unwelcoming” to be active discrimination against people, with the intent of alienating them from society at large, but this is open to interpretation. 

“The Other” -This is a technical term from a few different literary perspectives. On a broad level, the Other is a person or group of people who are viewed as the ‘enemy’ or different from the dominant culture. 

These keywords are essentially what you have to include in terms of knowledge. But, what is the question? Our essay topic says “To what extent do you agree?”. You can choose to agree, or not at all, or be somewhere in the middle. Any of these options consider the  extent  of Venice’s welcomeness, but you have to use evidence, and uniquely, a literary perspective. 

My Approach

Before I even choose my contention, now is the time to decide which perspective to use for my essay. A few apply to the question and  Othello , but I can only have one. Using Feminism you could argue that the women of the play are ‘Othered,’ but because they lack lots of meaningful dialogue I think it would be hard to uncover enough evidence. Marxism would also be good and would argue the working-class is othered. The issue with Marxist interpretations of  Othello , however, is that there are almost no lower-class characters. Marxist theorists also regularly adopt feminist and postcolonial language, meaning I could appear as though I used multiple perspectives. I think Postcolonialism is the ideal perspective. The term “Other” was coined by postcolonial theorists, and Othello’s race and place in Venetian society give me the ability to flex my understanding of postcolonialism. 

So, now that I know I am writing from a postcolonial perspective, I can come up with a contention. First of all, who is the Other, according to postcolonialism? In  Othello,  it is quite clearly Othello himself, who is from North Africa, and is constantly the victim of racism, which begins to answer my second question; is Othello welcomed by Venetian Society? Well, it’s complicated, he’s an army commander and woos a Venetian woman, but he constantly has to prove himself worthy of these things. As a result, my contention will be somewhere in between complete agreement and complete disagreement with the question. 

The othered characters in  Othello  are orientalised by most members of Venetian society, and must constantly prove their material worth to maintain their agency. Despite this, the women of the play act as a foil to the racism and distrust of society.

Postcolonialism

Postcolonial theory has roots in a more modern context than Shakespeare. The colonialism of the 19th century and the decolonisation of the 20th century lead to colonised people reevaluating their lives and the role of the European colonists on a global, social, and psychological scale. When writing from a postcolonial lens, you should try to focus on some key areas. The most significant is the relationship between the colonised and the coloniser. How do they interact? What do they think of each other? The next area is the psychology of colonialism. One useful theorist here is Frantz Fanon, a psychologist living during the French colonisation of Algier. His text  The Wretched of the Earth  stated the ways that colonised Africans were mentally oppressed, viewing themselves as less than human. This is important when discussing the Other because ‘other’ represents the dehumanisation of Native lives which caused such psychological distress. A term I used in my contention should also be explained: orientalism. This term was coined by Edward Said and it explores the way the Other is viewed by the West. To ‘orientalise’ something is to portray it as something wholly different to European cultures, and exaggerate these differences. It results in non-Europeans being viewed as ‘backwards’ or ‘savage’ and justifies racist stereotypes. Other useful Postcolonial terms include: the Subaltern, who are the groups completely outside the margins of society, or people who lack any freedom; and Agency is the ability to act out of free-will and have a degree of power.

With my contention and some useful postcolonial terms, I can now plan each paragraph. I am doing three, but it is possible to do four or more. I follow TEEL (Topic, explanation, evidence, link) structure quite closely, and have given simple but punchy topic sentences for each paragraph. When structuring the essay as a whole, I try to make sure each paragraph builds off of the previous argument, almost like a staircase leading to my conclusion. 

1. Othello is treated as an outsider and is a victim of racism and orientalisation due to his cultural background, constantly reminded that he is not fully Venetian. 

My goal in this paragraph is to agree with the question. My explanation has to show that Othello isn’t welcome in Venetian society, highlighting that his blackness and European views of the Moors fits Edward Said’s theory of orientalism. I will mainly rely on Iago’s perception of Othello, and Iago as a symbol of Venice’s intoleration towards the Other. 

Evidence of his culture being viewed as ‘backwards’ or fundamentally different from Venice will support this point. Iago’s first monologue (1.1.8-33) displays his intolerance to outsiders, specifically referring to Othello as “the Moor”, rather than by his name. Roderigo also displays a racist attitude, calling Othello “the thick-lips” (1.1.71). You should try to choose linguistically significant evidence. For example, Iago’s metaphor of a “black ram is tupping [Brabantio’s] white ewe” (1.1.96-7) provokes imagery of the devil (black ram) defiling a symbol of purity (a white ewe). 

To link this paragraph, refer to the use of orientalism as a method of othering that turns people against Othello, and intends to keep him separate (unwelcome) from society.

2. Despite Iago’s representation of an intolerant Venice, Othello displays a pathway for the Other to prove themselves in Venetian society, although this proof is constantly reevaluated by the dominant culture.

In this argument I’m going against my previous paragraph, saying that Othello is welcome, but on a case-by-case basis. My explanation will include an analysis of how Othello is othered and orientalised, but still displays agency and has a role of authority in Venice. Othello is trusted, but it is a very loose trust that relies on Othello’s continued adherence to society’s rules. To use postcolonial language, Othello is the Other, but he is not a subaltern; he has been given a place at the coloniser’s table. But despite viewing himself as a permanent part of this table, the colonisers are always ready to remove his seat. 

I could use Brabantio as evidence of this, as he had “loved [Othello” (1.3.145) but quickly begins to refer to his “sooty bosom” (1.2.85) and “foul charms” (1.2.88) when he thinks Othello has overstepped his place in Venetian society by marrying a white woman. Even though Othello has proven himself as a General, the senate makes him answer for accusations based on racism and stigma. Once Othello begins to fall for Iago’s trap of jealousy, Lodovico questions the faith placed in Othello, claiming “I am deceived in him” (4.2.310).

Therefore, despite being allowed a place within the Governmental structures of Venice, Othello’s agency is constantly at risk, being welcomed for his proven talents, but distrusted for his ‘Otherness’.

3. Although Venetian society at large is unwelcoming to Othello, either through racism or distrust, Desdemona represents an attitude of acceptance towards the Other.

This argument looks at a different aspect of the question; who is the Other welcomed by? Besides Othello, Othered characters are the women and Cassio, who is from Florence. Despite not fitting into the key areas of postcolonial thought, women still have a place in this analysis, as a subcategory of the native’s relationship with the coloniser. How does a group that is discriminated against in their own society treat someone else who is discriminated against? Well, we see in  Othello  that the women treat him quite well. 

Desdemona is the obvious source of evidence for this. Her adoration of Othello transcends his colour and she accepts him as part of her Venetian world. She is unswayed by the racist commentary on Othello from those around her, such as Emilia, and instead represents the welcoming of the Other on a personal, although not societal level.

Thus, Desdemona in her own Otherness and orderliness acts a foil to Iago’s disorder and discrimination. As a discriminated against woman, she represents the acceptance of the other in Venetian society, and the unbridled trust of Othello that the men of Venice lack.

Your conclusion should include a restatement of your arguments and your contention but also look at them in another way. I usually go through my points and how they relate to each other and my contention in a logical step-by-step way, each point building on the other to reach my contention. Point 1 leads to point 2, which leads to point 3, and combined, makes my contention. 

Hopefully, this brief guide to literary perspectives in  Othello , focusing on postcolonialism, acts as a starting point for your studies. It’s about understanding the beliefs of the lens and then using this to form an argument. It certainly isn’t easy, so I encourage you to read around and practice this writing style as much as possible. 

Recommended Resources

On shakespeare.

How to Approach Shakespeare-Studying Shakespeare for the First time

Post-colonialism in Shakespearean Work by Alina Popa (2013)

On Postcolonialism

Literary Perspectives 101

List of Postcolonial Terms

Definition of Postcolonialism

Benefits of Critical Essays for Literary Perspectives Essays

The Wretched of the Earth by Frantz Fanon (2001), Penguin Modern Classics, Great Britain.

Orientalism by Edward W. Said (2003), Penguin Modern Classics, Great Britain.

The big trap students doing both English and Literature fall into is the habit of writing Close Readings like a Language Analysis essay. In essence, the two of these essays must tick the same boxes. But, here’s why analysing texts in Literature is a whole different ball game – in English, you want to be focusing on the methods that the author utilises to get their message across, whereas Literature is all about finding your own message in the writing.

In a  Language Analysis  essay, the chances are that most students will interpret the contention of the writer in a similar fashion and that will usually be stated in the introduction of the essay. Whereas in Literature, it is the formulation of your interpretation of the author’s message that is what really counts. In a typical Language Analysis essay, the introduction is almost like a summary of what’s going to be talked about in the next few paragraphs whereas in a close reading, it is the fresh ideas beyond the introduction that the markers are interested in.

For this reason, every Close Reading that you do in Literature will be unique. The overarching themes of the text you are writing from may be recurring, but for every passage from the text that you are given, what you derive from that will be specific to it.

From my experience, this is what stumps a lot of students because of the tendency is to pick up on the first few poetic techniques used in the passages and create the basis for the essay from that. This usually means that the student will pick up on alliteration (or another technique that they find easy to identify) used by the author and then try and match it to an idea that they have discussed in class. Whilst this can be an effective way to structure paragraphs, many students aren’t consciously utilising this approach and instead are doing it ‘by accident’ under time pressure, or a lack of understanding of other ways to get a point across.

In general, there are two main approaches that can be followed for body paragraphs in a literature close reading analysis:

1. Start wide and narrow down.

What does this mean? So, as I mentioned before, each of your close readings should be very specific to the passages in front of you and not rehearsed. However, it’s inevitable that you are going to find some ideas coming back more often. So, after reading through the passage, you will usually get a general understanding of the tone that the author has utilised. This will indicate whether the author is criticising or commending a certain character or social idea. Using this general overview to start your paragraph, you can then move closer and closer into the passage until you have developed your general statement into a very unique and clear opinion of the author’s message (with the support of textual evidence of course).

This is the essay approach that is generally preferred by students but is often used poorly, as without practice and under the pressure of writing essays in exam conditions, many students revert back to the old technique of finding a literary device that they are comfortable with and pushing forth with that.

The good thing about this approach is that when you understand the general themes that the author covers, you will become better and better at using that lens to identify the most impactful parts of the passage to unpack as you scrutinise the subtle nuances of the writer’s tone.

2. Start narrow and go wide.

You guessed it - it’s basically the opposite of the approach above. However, this is a more refined way of setting out your exploration of the author’s message as opposed to what was discussed earlier (finding random literary devices and trying to go from there). Using this approach does not mean that you have no direction of where your paragraph might end, it just means that you think the subtle ideas of the author can be used in culmination to prove their wider opinion. For example, if you get a passage where the author describes a character in great detail (Charlotte Brontë students, you might be familiar!) and you think there is a lot of underlying hints that the author is getting at through such an intricate use of words, then you might want to begin your paragraphs with these examples and then move wider to state how this affects the total persona built around this character and then maybe even a step further to describe how the writer’s attitude towards this character is actually a representation of how they feel towards the social ideas that the character represents.

The benefit of this approach is that if you are a student that finds that when you try and specify on a couple of key points within a large theme, you end up getting muddled up with the potential number of avenues you could be writing about, this style gives a bit of direction to your writing. This approach is also helpful when you are trying to link your broader themes together.

The main thing to remember in the structure of your body paragraphs – the link between your examples and the broader themes that you bring up should be very much evident to the marker. They should not have to work to find the link between the examples you are bringing up and the points that you are making. Remember, a Close Reading is all about the passage that is right in front of you and its relation in the context of the whole text and the writer’s message. Be clear about your opinion, it matters!

Happy writing!

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Accent is very important in Britain.   Advertisers on television only use regional accents for voice-overs if the product is cheap or if the aim is to amuse.   Serious things or expensive products use the voices of middle-class men.   During the war, the BBC had to use "middle class" speakers the read the news because no one believed the people with regional accents.   This has now changed, which goes to show that social factors in languages do vary and change over time.   However, not all regional accents have the same social acceptability and "broad" (that is, strong) regional accents are still cannot be too strong for some media broadcasts.

Everyone seems to have an idea what is a "good" language or variety and what is a "bad" one.   This opinion is entirely socially conditioned.   Sometimes people with power (e.g. governments or schools) decide what is a good or bad language.    Sometimes it is just ordinary members of a language community who have these views.   Linguistically they are all the same, because they can all communicate in the same way, but they just have different social values.

In the past, many deaf people weren't proud of their language and even denied they used it.   Now, there is more pride, but many deaf and hearing people still think it is not a "good" language, or that English is in some way "better".   English is not "better" than BSL in any way, except that it does have a higher status in British society.  

Social context will look at the relationship between language and power and attitudes to language.   The language that someone uses may influence other people's attitudes towards them.   People have fought and died for language (e.g. in medieval times people were accused of heresy for saying that the bible should be translated from Latin into English.   In some countries in the world, you can be arrested for speaking a forbidden language).  

The history of BSL is closely tied up with power.   We can think of some of the abuses of children caught using signing in school.    We can think of hearing people telling deaf people that they are stupid because "Deaf English" is influenced by BSL, so it looks like "bad English".   Deaf people are often denied access to all sorts of jobs, or roles in society (e.g. serving on juries) just because they don't use English. Hearing people writing in journals and newspapers about deaf people and get it wrong, but deaf people don't get the chance to reply because they feel their English is not up to writing a publishable reply.   All these are examples of a language being affected by power.

This is the same for many languages all around the world, for example, minority languages in India.   People may think their language is not a good language because it isn't the one taught in schools and isn't used in business.   People who use another language make more money and other people respect them, so people want to use that language.

There may be some ways in which the language we use influences people and society.   However, it is also possible that:

1)       People influence language and language use

We can see this if we look at the way people in different social groups use language differently.   Younger people sign differently from older people; people from different regions might use different types of language.

The number of deaf people in a society affects the language.    In Britain, BSL has survived so well because about 10% of deaf people come from deaf families, so children from hearing families learn from them, and the language is passed on.   This core 10% is very important to BSL.   But not all languages are the same because not all societies are the same.   In other countries, there is no central deaf community, so the language is very different.   For example, in Nicaragua it would appear that there is almost no genetic deafness, which means that no deaf children learn sign language from their parents.   (We will come back to Nicaragua later in the course).   In other societies (like in the old Martha's Vineyard, or in Yucatan in Mexico or Bali in Indonesia) where there are many deaf people, the language is much stronger.   There is a slum area in Mexico City where there is a very high incidence of deafness.   These shanty-town people are very poor and never go to school, and are too poor even to go to a deaf club but they have their own dialect of Mexican sign language because they all live nearby and there are so many of them.   We can see that the number of deaf people and their social situation affects the language that they use.

Power also comes in here when we discuss the influence of people and society upon a language: if you have power, you can manipulate the language to suit you. This is important here for sign languages.   This is not always a bad thing.   Think about De L'Epee and the power he had over French sign language.   Think about the responsibility of people who shape language e.g. BSLTA, or the people who made the BSL English dictionary.   In the past in Britain, the missioners had a great deal of social importance, and their signing was respected.   In the early 1980s, the production team of the BBC's See Hear! had power to decide that signing had to be accompanied by speech, even though many deaf people disagreed.   In other ways, deaf people have always had some power over their language because they have been the ones who use it every day.

READING:   I strongly recommend that you read Chapter 9 in Wardhaugh (pages 218 to 238) to complement this session.   Try to relate what you read to your knowledge and understanding of BSL.

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Social Context

Genomics is fostering an appreciation for what our DNA means for our health, identities and culture.

Introduction

Do you know what the slogan "it's in your DNA" is really all about? Our ever improving ability to read anyone's genome sequence raises many issues regarding the social context of genomics. Information about our genomes is starting to become part of our everyday life. Genomic information shapes societal messages about DNA in how we think about ourselves and how others view us.

Companies, universities, nonprofits, and many other organizations have used the slogan "it's in our DNA" to mean that something is part of their core mission or values. Our understanding of our DNA also extends to our understanding of ourselves: what is in your DNA? Is it the chin that looks like your mother's or the eye color that is just like your grandfather's? What story does your DNA tell about the hundreds or thousands of ancestors before you? What continents did they migrate through in times long past? How does your DNA contribute to who you are, or how you are treated within your society?

Continued studies of the ethical, legal, and social implications of genomic advances can help to break down barriers and yield a better appreciation of what truly is, and is not, in our DNA - and what that means to us, our families, and communities and society.

Ethical and Social Questions

The scientists who launched the Human Genome Project recognized immediately that having a complete human genome sequence would raise many ethical and social issues. In 1990, the  Ethical, Legal, and Social Implications (ELSI) Research Program  was formally established at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) as an integral part of the Human Genome Project. The research supported by this program, ranges from genomics and health disparities to inclusion of diverse populations in genomics research, to whether people should have the right to refuse to know genomic testing results. Over the last 15 years, this research has greatly advanced our understanding and appreciation of the complex societal implications of genomics.

Consent and Privacy

Among the  major areas of study in ELSI research  are questions about consent and privacy. For example, what do you need to know about a research study that will use your DNA before you agree to participate? That's called " informed consent ." As new areas of genomics have developed in recent years (like learning about microbiomes), researchers have needed to continually update their guidelines, so as to help people understand the relevant risks and benefits before signing up to be a research participant. Such studies are overseen by  Institutional Review Boards  (or IRBs), and these boards are made up of scientists, ethicists, and members of the community. An IRB must approve any research projects involving humans.

The widespread availability of genomic data has brought changes to privacy considerations as well. When a test is performed on your DNA, either through a research or clinical program, how is the  privacy of your genomic data maintained  and does that align with how you want those data to be protected? Since you share half of your genome with each of your parents, and half with each of your children, the information is not just about your genome. Should you be able to stop your relatives from revealing genomic information that could be relevant to you as well? And does that answer change based on what the test is for? Let's say that one of your parents learns from a genetic test that they have  Huntington's disease , which is often diagnosed quite late in life. This gives you a 50-50 chance of carrying the same genetic mutation for this fatal  neurological disease . Some people react to such information by wanting to know right away what their future might be, while others  do not want to know .

Another privacy issue that has arisen in the genomics era is when are you entitled to receive all of your data back from a DNA-based research study or a clinical test. In the case of genomic tests, this can often be a lot of data! Research studies do not often return data to their participants, whereas patients are more often provided the results of clinical tests. If you have had direct-to-consumer (or  DTC ) genomic testing, the companies might have let you download your entire dataset. You might want to share such data with other research groups in order to further science or  with other   healthcare professionals  for your medical care. There are also many questions about what the companies might do with the data, and most companies have user agreements which you must agree to, where they specify their plans up front. This may include sharing your data with others, including pharmaceutical companies and law enforcement. As  President Obama noted in 2016 , there is a difficult balance in making your data available for some purposes while still keeping them private for other reasons.

Discrimination

Concerns also exist about potential discrimination based on information about a person's DNA. In 2008, President Bush signed into law the  Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act  (or GINA for short). This law is now enforced by multiple federal agencies, including the  United States Equal Employment Opportunity Commission . You might have seen posters saying,  "Equal Employment Opportunity is THE LAW"  - those posters point out that GINA now specifically protects job applicants and current employees from discrimination based on their genetic information. GINA also prohibits health insurers from discriminating against anyone based on their genetic information when determining coverage or rates. At this time, GINA does not cover life insurance, disability insurance, or long-term care insurance. As in all potential discrimination areas, even though legal protections are in place under GINA, it is important to be knowledgeable about your rights and to know if and when they might be abused.

The broad availability of genomic ancestry testing is influencing the way we think about the concept of race in America (see  Human Origins   and Ancestry ). We now understand that skin color, as one component of how we think of ourselves, is due to a  complex interaction  of genes and the environment (see  Human Genomic Variation ). When we can see the genomic patterns of our ancestors in our own DNA, it might not be the same as how we describe ourselves (or how they described themselves). Large studies of African Americans in the United States have shown that their genomes contain an average of  25 percent European DNA sequences ; in the same studies, Latino genomes in the United States show a mix of DNA from African, Native American, and European sources. It turns out that two people who call themselves the same race may be quite different at the genomic level. With our emerging understanding of genomics, we can combine genomic information with historical records and social data in order to study the shaping of concepts such as race.

Other characteristics often associated with race are part of culture but are not written in our DNA. Racial terms change over time, sometimes even multiple times within one person's life. For example, the categories used by the national census in the United States have also contributed to what we think of as "race," but they  have changed quite substantially over time . The term "Hispanic" was not offered as a way that a person could describe themselves until the 1970 census, but by 2010, people could answer whether they were " of Hispanic, Latino, or Spanish origin. " Genomics is helping us understand the complex and intertwined relationships between a person's or groups' ancestry, ethnicity, and racial identity. The National Human Genome Research Institute is also monitoring the use of  race and ethnicity in biomedical research , including any influence on health disparities and  inclusion/engagement of underrepresented populations in genomics .

Science For Everyone

If you'd like to learn more about privacy issues, several nonprofit groups have created  GINAhelp.org , a website with much more information about the Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act. Many universities invite members of the public to join their IRBs to oversee medical research studies. A quick internet search for the universities in your area will reveal some options; here's one example from  the University of Washington . Or if you would like to get involved with genetic research, you can check out the All of Us Research Project's videos and community resources. The National Human Genome Research Project invites stakeholders to  get involved in their strategic planning process  as well.

Additional Resources

• Alondra Nelson - The Social Life of DNA Book
• Race: Are We So Different? Exhibition Website & Multimedia
• Department of Health and Human Services - Genetic Information
• Liz Lerman Dance Exchange - Ferocious Beauty: Genome Performance at the Mayo Clinic 2006

Resources for Educators

• Career Profile:  Intellectual Property Lawyer  |  Video
• Career Profile:  Bioethicist  |  Video
• My DNA Vending Machine - Gabe Barcia-Colombo, TED Fellows Retreat 2013 Video
• NWABR - Bioethics 101 Curriculum
• Genome: Unlocking Life's Code   - What Do You Think? Interactive
• American Society of Human Genetics - DNA Day Essay Contest

Last updated: June 15, 2020

• Scriptwriting

What is Context — Definition and Examples for Writers

C ontext has the ability to change the meaning of a story and how we view its characters — but what is context? We’re going to answer that question by looking at examples from The Office, In Cold Blood and more. We’ll also look at some tips and tricks for how you can effectively implement this necessary element in your own stories. By the end, you’ll know why context is so important and how to apply it in a variety of different ways. But before we jump into our examples, let’s define context.

Content vs Context Definition

What does context mean.

Whether we realize it or not, context is all around us. It is the fundamental way we come to understand people, situations and ideas. Everything that we think, say, see, hear, and do is a response to the external stimuli of the world.

And how we regard that stimuli is largely in response to the context it’s presented to us in. For more on this idea, check out the video from the University of Auckland below.

What is Context? By University of Auckland

So you’re probably thinking, “Okay that’s fine and good and all, but what is context? Surely the meaning can’t be so vague.” Well, it is and it isn’t.

But by understanding the essential aspects of the term, we’re better prepared to apply it in meaningful ways. So without further ado, let’s dive into a formal context definition.

CONTEXT DEFINITION

What is context.

Context is the facets of a situation, fictional or non-fictional, that inspire feelings, thoughts and beliefs of groups and individuals. It is the background information that allows people to make informed decisions. Most of the time, the view of a person on a subject will be made in response to the presented context. In storytelling, it is everything that surrounds the characters and plot to give both a particular perspective. No story takes place without contextual information and elements.

Characteristics of Context:

• Information that’s presented to us
• Used in an argumentative sense
• Biased/subjective form of education

ContextUal Information

Context clues : in and out of context.

In terms of storytelling, there are only two kinds of context: narrative and non-narrative. The former gives us information on the story and the latter gives us information on everything outside of the story.

Narrative types of context include: 

Narrative context is everything that explains “what’s going on” in a story. Take a comedy series like The Office for example: there are a lot of moments in the show that wouldn’t make sense without contextual information — and there just so happens to be a video that explores The Office “out of context.”

What Does Context Mean in The Office?

Even the most ardent fans of The Office may find themselves asking, “what in the world is going on?” when presented with these clips out of context. On social media channels, moments from film and television are often presented like this — like this screen grab from The Good Place .

Context Definition and Examples

In a sense, out of context moments have become a type of humor in and of themselves. But it’s important that we also consider how information outside of the narrative may influence our feelings on the story.

Non-narrative types of context include:

Non-narrative context is everything outside the story that influences our thoughts and opinions on the subject matter. Take Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood for example: when we learn of the circumstances outside of the subject matter, it’s impossible for us to feel the same way about the story.

In Cold Blood is an investigative novel about the murder of a family of four in Holcomb, Kansas. Capote started writing about the murders in earnest before expanding his research into a full-fledged novel — the end result speaks for itself — not only is Capote’s prose considered some of the greatest of all-time, but it also pioneered true-crime writing.

But when In Cold Blood is viewed through the context of the man who wrote it, the setting it took place in, and the precedence of its writing, the meaning is liable to change. The two convicted murderers in the novel, Perry Smith and Dick Hickock, were interviewed by Capote through the writing process.

Their testimony is admitted in the novel, but filtered by Capote. So, for us to say their testimonies are veracious would be irresponsible, considering the context through which it was written.

Elsewhere, critics argue that we can only judge a piece of art based on the merit of the art itself, not the context it was created in. French literary theorist Roland Barthes said that “text” can only speak for itself and that the thoughts and feelings of the author should have no impact on its merit. For more on this “The Death of the Author” theory, watch the video below.

Exploring Context Clues  •  Lindsay Ellis on ‘The Death of the Author’

In recent years, many fans have criticized J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter books in light of her political views. Some critics argue that her views change the meaning of the novels. Others argue that her views should have no impact. Alas, there’s no “right” answer, but it’s important to consider how context, both inside and outside of a story, can influence readers.

Context Clues Set the Stage

How to use context as exposition.

There’s a word in screenwriting that most screenwriters shutter to hear… and that word is exposition . Ah yes, the dreaded exposition — or explanatory description — has been known to sink more than a few good scripts. So, how do screenwriters use exposition effectively? Well, it starts with a need for context. When I say need, I mean the story would have no impact without it.

We imported the On the Waterfront screenplay into StudioBinder’s screenwriting software to look at an iconic scene where context is the primary force behind exposition. 

In this scene, Terry details how Charley and Johnny abandoned him. This backstory, or exposition, adds the necessary context needed to make Terry’s exclamation, “I coulda’ been a contender!” impactful.

Click the link below to read the scene.

What is Context?  •   Read the On the Waterfront Screenplay

This explanatory description establishes a context in which we’re able to see that Terry has endured “years of abuse.” The context is further executed as Terry laments the actions of his best friends. Think of it this way: proper exposition should act like a tea-kettle; each relevant detail making the kettle hotter and hotter — or more contextual and more contextual — until — the tension is released… and whoosh, the conflict is resolved. 

How to Add Context Clues

Tips for incorporating context.

Context plays a huge role in guiding the attention and emotional attachment of the audience. Say a character does something really bad, like kill another character. Our natural inclination is to vilify them, but if their actions are given context, we might view their actions as heroic.

Take Ridley Scott’s Gladiator for example: when Maximus kills Commodus, we view him as the hero. Let’s take a look at how this scene plays out:

Context Examples in Gladiator

In context, Maximus’ actions are justified. Commodus killed Maximus’ family and rigged the fight against him. As such, it makes sense that we root for his death. Here are some tips for how to incorporate context in your own works:

• Create empathy for your protagonist
• Vilify your antagonist
• Maximize conflict
• Develop themes
• Callback to prior events

By utilizing these strategies, you’ll create narrative continuity. Context relies on the impact of the past, so you should be mindful of the character’s pasts at all times when writing. 

What is a Plot?

Context may be what informs our understanding of a story’s events, but it would mean nothing if there weren’t events to be informed of. Plot refers to the events and actions that take place within a story — and it’s an essential aspect of every narrative. In this next article, we look at how plot is used in Die Hard to connect narrative threads from beginning to end!

Up Next: Plot Definition and Examples →

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