Thanks to the COM352 students for contributing a bunch of new pages! I'll be moving these pages into the main area of the wiki soon.

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Contexts That Make Me

Throughout the semester we will be talking about the influence of context on our writing, but context also affects how we come to define ourselves and what different ideas and opinions we bring to individual writing situations. Since no one person has exactly the same background as another, understanding how our opinions are tied to "where we come from" or our cultural interactions can be very helpful in making your opinions and perspectives understood by people who have different ideas and influences on their thinking. As a result, the best writers are aware, as much as possible, of how their own backgrounds and experiences have influenced their thinking. Gaining that awareness is the goal of this assignment: to think through the influence of a particular context on some aspect of yourself (an opinion, an action, a belief, etc.) and share it with your classmates as a way of both getting to know one another and preparing for the less familiar audiences we will be writing to later in the course.

For this essay, then, I will ask you to begin thinking of yourself as part of a context. How have you been influenced by the places, people, and culture you have experienced? Context, as we will see in class, can be very broadly defined to include large cultural categories like race, gender, and ethnicity; be much more local and include your hometown, your high school, or even the viewer of a particular TV show; or even more likely be a combination of the two. The key is to choose a context that you think has had a significant impact on you and describe that context in such a way that readers who have little experience with it can both understand the context and its influence on you. That influence, however, need not be a direct cause and effect; it may just as often be a reaction “against” a context. For example, contexts can also lead to applying labels that may or may not fit with our sense of ourselves. For example, someone could be identified as a white, middle-class, Catholic woman, but not agree with the set of assumptions that these labels apply. In these cases, it may be more interesting to investigate how we think we do not fit easily with the definitions a context might imply and what other influences, perhaps, helped us exceed that context or see problems with it.

Some of the questions you might aim to answer include:

• How am I a typical member of X (insert context here)?
• How am I different than others who share this context with me? What accounts for those differences?
• What kind of person would I be if I had a much different context than X (e.g. was a different gender, grew up in another town, etc.)?
• How has this context influenced who I am today?

These are not questions that you necessarily need to answer in the paper, but they provide some ways to consider the issue of "influence."