Rhetorical Situation: Context Towle ENGL 106

What is context?  External factors affecting audience, purpose, and design  Includes:  Time and place of communication  Setting of the audience  Audience and topic histories  Institutional situation

Questions to consider  What are the external factors that influence the way a website’s audience accesses and uses the site?  How do audience experiences affect the way a site is used or interpreted?  What are external factors that influence purpose and design?  Where are the readers? What sort of expectations will they be bringing with them?  What is the institutional context of a website? What historical factors influence the way it conveys information to its audience?

Example One – Sara’s Paper Everyone is different… furthermore every Christian is different. They all have a different story and are all in different stages of their faith, which makes it hard to pin point one specific context for the website, She Reads Truth. Context depends on the environment, mood, and timing. When ladies access this source, the context is different for all of them. For one women it might be late at night and she’s searching for some encouragement after a long, taxing day. All she wants is to end her day on a positive note. Another young lady might be reading a devotional as the sunrises. She wants to start her day off positive and enlightened. She wants to try to apply what she’s learned that morning throughout her day, week, month and many years to come. Lastly, but certainly not least, is the new found believer. She heard of the site through a fellow Christian and is investigating what the site is and how it might help her. She needs guidance and though the site may be a good place to start. These are only three examples of possible contexts for She Reads Truth. There are many more examples and they are constantly changing.

Example Two – Matt’s Paper This brings us to the context of this website. Within the past 8 years, starting in 2007, video games, which used to be a more niche hobby, have become increasingly more popular to the mainstream audience marked the release of games such as Portal, Halo 3, and Call of Duty 4, which became best sellers and helped boost the popularity of the Xbox 360 and the video game distribution software, Steam. However, with the popularity of these games came a casualization of the art as a whole. These games sparked the release of numerous first- person shooters over the next 8 years. These games however don’t really appeal to people who like to play lesser known role-playing games like Ys or Dragon Quest for example. Therefore, the website Siliconera was created by people who enjoyed less popular games for the purpose of sharing news and information about them with other people interested in these type of games. In short, the purpose of this website is to be a home for people interested in less popular games to get the same amount of news coverage that a regular video game review site would give a more mainstream game, or a “AAA game” as a typical reader would call it.

Resources  Compose Design Advocate, p  Purdue OWL – Setting: