Imagine you just got a big award after only a few months in your new job.
Or you just hit a huge pothole when you’d already forgotten your lunch that day!
When the odds stack up in--or out of--our favor, it might send us scrambling
to figure out why.
You may have heard the explanation, “I was in the right place at the right time,”
or, more ominously, “I was in the wrong place at the wrong time.”
These expressions focus on instances when timing and location really affect our outcomes.
Just a slight change in my driving route might have saved me hundreds of dollars, after all!
Timing and location are part of context, the factors that shape a particular situation.
Context not only influences our world but also determines the ranges of possibilities
that can happen in it.
Context is an important rhetorical concept because deliberately examining our location
and timing can help us
become more effective communicators.
We want to give our messages as much thought and care as we can,
so we’ll work to break context down into some of its most useful parts today in Study
Hall: Composition,
presented by Arizona State University and Crash Course. I’m Yumna Samie, let’s get started.
We already have an intuitive sense of opportune, or particularly good, times
and places for our messages.
If your friend just found out she didn’t get a part in the spring musical,
you probably know better than to brag about your good grade on a test.
Still, many of us have made a context mistake before.
We’ve looked back and thought, for example,
“Asking my friend about her audition right when she saw the cast list was probably not
the best call,”
since she started crying and tore up her monologue. Yikes.
Context analysis lets us build on our intuition and look more thoroughly at what is possible--
and likely to succeed--in a given context.
There are two ways to think about the ‘when’ of a text that we’re writing.
Both come from Greek words.
Chronos is what we think of as ‘clock time,’ which has to do with duration, sequence, dates,
all the normal time stuff.
It moves at a steady rate, tick tick tick, you get the drill.
Kairos, on the other hand, is the ‘opportune time’.
It arrives unpredictably, as the right combination of a bunch of factors.
Communication that occurs at the right kairotic moment may have failed any other time.
For example, consider an employee deciding when to tell their boss that they’ve decided
to go back to school,
which could throw off their employer’s future plans and damage their relationship.
Sure, they can send an announcement at any time,
but there are a few considerations of timing that can make the conversation go better.
There are basic chronos-related choices:
if they send the announcement to their boss at 2am, it’ll be a while before she sees it.
Plus, she might wonder why it was sent at such an off-kilter time.
Sending it during work hours--or saying it to their boss during a one-on-one meeting--should
go better for them. But the kairotic moment goes beyond the time of day.
It might be better to announce that they’re leaving after getting a glowing performance review
instead of right after taking a two week vacation that left a bunch of coworkers scrambling.
Who knows, if their boss is feeling happy when she hears the news,
she might consider letting them work part-time or write a great recommendation for their
next job!
When writing, we should think about larger cultural and political moments that affect
whether this is the right time for our message, too.
If that employee’s industry has started requiring master’s degrees for advancement
in the field,
their employer might be less surprised by their choice to go back to school.
Timing really can be everything.
But context is more than just the ‘when.’ It’s also the ‘where’ of the text.
The ‘where,’ like the kairotic ‘when,’ can involve factors like culture or geography.
For instance, the resume or CV you submit for a job application will look a little different
depending on your industry and your physical location.
Cultural expectations in different places govern whether including a photograph
or personal information like your hobbies on your resume is standard or too casual.
Cultural location can also determine whether to include slang in your writing,
while geographical location might determine whether you can use email or have to rely
on snail mail.
However, the most impactful ‘where’ of your writing is often the writing medium,
or place where your writing occurs or is shared.
That location includes things like, Twitter or The New York Times front page or your college
application website,
not just Nova Scotia or Cape Town or Room 212 of your university.
Consider Twitter as an example: the word limit on Tweets restrains the way that we write.
Twitter users may know the feeling of being ‘just over’ the character count and going
back to cut parts of their tweet.
Suddenly, we have to decide whether “2b” is or is not “to be.”
We literally write differently because of where we’re writing!
And if you choose to make a longer message, Twitter does have the option to
‘thread’ your tweets.
But if you don’t do that, your messages will appear out of order on people’s timelines,
making your rant about how chip bags are 60% air and 0% chips nearly impossible to understand.
Not sticking with the implied ‘rules’ of the medium can ruin your message.
Marshall McLuhan, a 20th century media theorist, expanded on this idea and made the radical
point, “the medium is the message.”
McLuhan’s point is that your message is altered, and in many ways actually determined,
by the way you share it with others.
Think about it: a host reading a four-sentence news story about a hurricane in a sleepy voice
on a public radio station
is going to have a very different effect than a reporter saying the same information over
the howling winds on live TV.
Same words, totally different message.
Our messages aren’t just influenced by the way we convey them: the media creates the
range of possibilities.
Imagine you write for a humor website full of satirical articles.
If you become really invested in a save-the-sea-turtles campaign,
the very fact that your website is satirical will limit how much you can publicize it.
People come to the site for laughs and critiques,
so they might think your praise of the campaign in that context means the opposite.
You might have to find another medium entirely in order to share your passion and get the
response you want.
That’s how much the medium is the message.
Context encompasses even more than these ‘when’ and ‘where’ factors,
so we’re going to keep talking about them in our next video.
For now, let’s turn to a technique that will help us sort out the timing and location
of our writing:
playing the counterfactual game.
Counterfactual, fancy as it sounds, just means something that isn’t the case.
This strategy is a way of thinking about a particular situation as if certain elements
were different,
to see if those elements would change the impact or consequences of your writing.
To play the counterfactual game, first, take a sheet of paper or a new file on your computer
and write what you want to say at the top.
Then, create two columns: one for “when” and one for “where.”
Write down every factor you can think of that might influence how your message is received
based on those two categories.
Keep in mind ‘kairos,’ or opportune timing, as well as the medium, cultural, and physical
locations.
From there, circle the most important factors,
the ones you believe will influence your message’s reception the most.
Write your message at the bottom of the page or on a new sheet, addressing that context.
Yes, this will look different for each kind of message.
For instance, posting your save-the-sea-turtles campaign on a satire website versus a news site
will have a bigger impact on your message than whether you send it at 9am or 10am.
Now, rewrite your message a few times, imagining a different situation using the items on your list:
a new location, a new medium of communication, or a new timing.
As you’re working through various versions of the message,
you’ll see what factors are changing it most.
Those factors are the writing task’s critical context, the factors we most want to take
into account.
Recognizing these factors can lead you to make a change to your writing plan.
Maybe you’ll choose a different location or timing, depending on which rewritten version
seems most likely to get your message across.
Let’s see how this works for a Writer in Action.
Divya writes content for the marketing department at Rockin’n’Rollin’,
a direct-to-consumer rocking chair retailer.
When her boss asks her for new slogans for future marketing campaigns, she decides to
play the counterfactual game.
She grabs a piece of paper and writes “you should buy our rocking chairs!” above her
two columns for ‘when’ and ‘where.’
First, she writes down all the ‘when’ factors: the premiere of a new interior design
show could provide a kairotic moment for a TV ad.
She circles ‘June’ and ‘September’--the months when people tend to move--since many
people buy new furniture when they get a new place.
Second, she writes all the ‘where’ factors she can think of,
from cultural associations of rocking chairs with people who have time on their hands to
where her company could advertise:
billboards, furniture stores, and magazines.
She circles “housekeeping magazines,” the factor that really gets her attention.
Then she writes a few versions of slogans, comparing how her favorite,
“Take time to get to know each other,” works as a 10-second Instagram Story versus
a two-page spread in Wrap-Around Porch Digest.
Looking at the changes she’s made to her slogan, she realizes that ‘seasonal timing is key'--
since the slogan makes more sense for front porch rocking--and circles it.
She also sees that her slogan works best in media with space for a beautiful picture of
a porch,
like the “housekeeping magazines” she originally circled.
These key contextual factors inform her as she finalizes her slogan idea.
Her boss is impressed with the strength of the options she presents.
He thinks her ideas can help Rockin’n’Rollin’ expand into new times and locations to advertise.
Divya is a Writer in Action!
Intuitively taking context into account when we write is good, but thinking deliberately
and systematically about it is even better.
We uncover possibilities and limitations that might not occur to us at first,
and we can work with contextual factors to create more purposeful texts.
Our context analysis skills affect whether we’re successful in a particular writing project.
They also help us avoid being ‘in the wrong place at the wrong time,’
which, you know, is a bad place to be. And kinda cliché too.
Join us next time when we dig deeper into the idea of the medium as the message,
discussing the ‘how’ and ‘what’ of communication contexts.
Thanks for watching Study Hall: Composition, which is produced by Arizona State University
and the Crash Course team at Complexly.
If you liked this video and want to keep learning with us here in Study Hall, be sure to subscribe.
You can learn more about ASU and the videos produced by Crash Course
in the links in the description.
See you next time!