Rhetorical terms · AP English Language, SAT Reading and Writing, ACT Reading
Context
Context: The historical, cultural and immediate circumstances surrounding a text that shape how it is written and received.
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What it means
Context includes the time period, the events leading up to a text, the cultural values of the audience and the place where the text appears. A text published in a newspaper during wartime carries different weight from the same words published decades later in an anthology.
Context differs from exigence: the exigence is the specific trigger for the text, while context is the wider set of conditions around it.
Example
A 1940s radio address urging citizens to buy war bonds draws on a context of rationing, national sacrifice and fear about the war's outcome, which makes its appeals to shared duty especially powerful.
On the exam
Use context to explain why a choice would land a certain way with the original audience, especially in rhetorical analysis passages from earlier centuries.