the context of this essay meaning

Definition of Context

Difference between content and context, rhetorical context: purpose, author, and audience, use of context in sentences, examples of context in literature, example #1: a tale of two cities by charles dickens, example #2: animal farm by george orwell, example #3: dr. faustus by christopher marlowe, example #4: oedipus rex by sophocles, example #5: lord of the flies by william golding.

“While stranded on a deserted island, a group of boys believe there is a dangerous creature lurking in the underbrush; Simon is the first to identify this menace, suggesting to the boys that ‘maybe,’ he said hesitantly, ‘maybe there is a beast’.”

Synonyms of Context

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What Is Context In English And How Do I Write About It?

Confused by context? Befuddled by the difference between values and attitudes? In this article, we'll clear those concepts up and show you how to ace your next contextual study.

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Do you get confused by the whole “context” business that crops up in various English Modules? You’re not alone. Many students get confused by conflicting messages to “talk about context” when also being instructed to “not write a history essay.’ Others aren’t entirely sure what context is, what’s meant by values and attitudes. To help you out, we’re going to answer the question, “What is context in English and how do I write about it?”

What is context?

Context, in terms of the study of High School English, is best described as the circumstances surrounding the composition of a text. When we discuss the context of a text, we need to think about the following aspects of the text’s composition:

• Historical – What has happened at the time
• Political – What the political climate and events of the period were
• Economic and Socio-economic – What the financial situation of the period was and how it affected individuals of the time
• Cultural and social – These are social impacts on a text that can be from artistic movements or cultural practices from customs to colloquialisms
• Religious – The impacts religion and religious beliefs have on the text
• Geographic – How has the location of the text’s composition shaped its meaning?
• The composer’s personal context – What events in a composers life have shaped their writing?

Complicating thing it’s not enough to say that “Shakespeare was a catholic who wrote in the Elizabethan period.” We also need to think about why context is important, this means digging into relevant contextual details and thinking about values and attitudes . This may seem overwhelming, but it shouldn’t be. So, let’s unpack these, one by one.

What’s ‘relevant’ context?

The first question you need to address is whether the context you’re exploring is relevant or not. How do I tell if an aspect of context is important or not, you ask.

The simplest way to approach this at a High School level is to consider if it has a direct impact on the text’s content and meaning or its composition. To answer this you’ll have to know your text and you’ll have to know some contextual details to decide whether they should be investigated further or not.

A good place to start is the dates involved in a text’s composition. A good text and context combination to consider as an example are the poems of TS Eliot that are set for study in the HSC and the contextual event of the First World War. This is a common one students get tripped up with.

The poems set for study are :

• Preludes – composed 1910-11, first published in 1915
• Rhapsody on a winter’s night – composed 1910-11, first published in 1915
• The love song of J Alfred Prufrock – composed 1910-11, first published in 1915
• The Hollow Men – composed and published in 1925
• Journey of the Magi – composed and published 1927

Many students discuss the tensions in Preludes, Rhapsody, and The love song of J Alfred Prufrock as caused by the horrors of World War 1: July 1914 – November 1918. This can be a bit confusing. The poems were mostly written in 1910 when Eliot was studying in France. They were published a few years later by his friend after he’d settled in England.

However, the poems clearly predate the 1st World War and while the political and nationalistic tensions that led to the conflict, placing too much weight on that would be very tenuous. This is a bit of anachronism: thinking of things “out of time.” Instead, we can see that these poems all occur in the wake of the second industrial revolution where urbanisation and economic upheaval have had profound impacts on the lives of people living in European cities.

You can read more about TS Eliot, here .

How much detail should I discuss?

It’s important to strike a balance between making a concise contextual point and writing a history essay! This can be challenging, especially the more you know about history. A significant paradox – you can’t write about context without understanding details about it: writing concisely and briefly about context becomes more challenging the more you know!

Let’s look at George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four  as an example. 1984 was written in 1944 – 1948. Clearly, we can see the following events could have had an impact on the composition of his final novel:

• The Russian Revolution (October 1918) and rise of communism – 1917 onwards (The Soviet Union Collapsed four decades after Orwell’s death in 1950)
• The rise of Fascism across Europe – 1922 onwards
• The Spanish Civil War – 1936 – 1939
• The Second World War 1938-1945
• The development of nuclear weapons and bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki
• Orwell’s leftist political leanings and hatred of Communism
• Orwell’s personal health – He died of tuberculosis
• Orwell’s relationships – He had tumultuous relationships and was a notorious womaniser

As you can see, there are myriad things that you can connect to context for the novel that are important and relevant. Your job, as a critic is to concisely include references to the events that are particularly pertinent to answer the question you’ve been set. Let’s use the Spanish Civil War as an example.

The Spanish Civil War is important contextually because:

• It saw the rise of fascist leader General Fransisco Franco
• Many in Europe romanticised the uprising of the people against a fascist military
• Many artists flocked to Spain to fight against the fascists
• Orwell fought and was seriously injured there
• Orwell wrote about his experiences in Homage to Catalonia
• The truces between Stalin, Hitler, Franco, and the rest of Europe were important blueprints for the fictional conflicts and alliances between Eurasia, Oceania, and East Asia
• The Soviet secret police hunted down and executed dissidents on behalf of Franco’s forces
• Orwell spent a night hiding in a bombed-out church while being pursued by the NKVD

There’s a lot to digest there. So, to give an example of dos and don’ts, let us consider a quotation from the text where context is essential to explain things.

What’s the example:

The Thought Police would get him just the same. He had committed–would still have committed, even if he had never set pen to paper–the essential crime that contained all others in itself. – Chapter 1

In this extract, the protagonist, Winston, describes the dangers of the secret police that enforce the law in the dystopian world of the novel. He uses a paradox to describe this – that he would still be guilty even if he hadn’t committed the crime.

Don’t get lost in context:

While some of this is quite pertinent information, it is too detailed and doesn’t really serve to further an argument. Instead,

Do connect context to analysis concisely:

As you can see, just one or two concise pieces of contextual information support the argument being made.

Need expert help refining your writing about context?

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What are values and attitudes?

Another aspect of writing about context that frustrates students is discussing values and attitudes .

First, some definitions:

• Values : These are the beliefs – cultural, religious, political, economic, philosophical, social – that exist in any given period. Democracy is the dominant political value in Australia in the 2020s.
• Attitudes : These are the perspectives individuals or larger groups have towards values. For example, some members of society might have the attitude that feels democracy is a terrible idea and they should be in charge of an Australian dictatorship.

All texts deal with values and attitudes. Quite often, composers of texts convey the prevailing values of a society in the background context of a text. They then present their perspective on these things, their attitude, by how they have characters interact or act under these values.

To return to the example of Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four:

• The setting of Airstrip One and Oceania reflects the creeping values of fascism and tyranny across Europe during the years of World War 2
• Winston’s futile struggle against Big Brother and Ingsoc arguably reflect Orwell’s growing pessimistic attitude towards escaping such tyranny.

We could convert this in our previous response by amending it to:

If you want to learn more about Nineteen Eighty-Four, read this article .

How should I structure contextual information in a response?

Many students struggle with writing things in a manner that connects the example and analysis to relevant contextual information.

Let’s look at a couple of different ways you can structure all of this in a response. To illustrate, let’s look at a pair of contrasting examples from Stephen Daldry’s 2002 film, The Hours (set for English Adv Mod A).

What is The Hours, what’s it about?

Daldry’s film is an adaptation of Virginia Woolf’s 1925 novel Mrs Dalloway (to be specific, it’s an adaptation of a novel by Michael Cunningham which is an adaptation of Woolf’s text). Woolf’s novel depicted a day in the life of housewife Clarissa Dalloway as she set about hosting a party. In brief, throughout the novel, she seeks to be recognised for hosting a party as male characters are recognised for their pursuits. In The Hours , the characters of Laura and Clarissa are simulacra of Clarissa Dalloway. Unlike Clarissa, Laura – a housewife in 1950s America, is not adept at fulfilling the oppressive stereotypical roles of being a housewife – she feels smothered by her responsibilities as a wife and a mother. Clarissa is a successful editor at a prestigious publishing house, in the film, she is organising a party to celebrate her friend and former lover Richard’s career. Where Laura struggles with fulfilling expectations, Clarissa does them effortlessly – successful career, doting mother, loving wife, caring friend, wizard in the kitchen, effortless hostess.

Daldry conveys this in the film by using contrasting mise en scene across the different time periods:

In these contrasting stills, we can see is en scene being used to convey contextual information as well as contrasting different characteristics about the two women relevant to the film’s themes.

In the left hand still, Laura struggles to bake a cake for her husband’s birthday. While dressed in a fancy frock, she is a little unkempt her hair isn’t done, her dress is a little wrinkled, her cake is a disaster. The costuming and set dressing clearly mark the setting as the 1950s, yet Laura’s appearance and creation show she doesn’t fit the stereotypical wife (especially in contrast to her impeccably dressed best friend, Kitty). This is a commentary on the oppressive nature of gender roles during that period of time.

In the right hand still, Clarissa is choosing to host a party for her friend and lover. While she has a successful career, she still can’t escape the expectations of society that she be all things for all people. Unlike the mise-en-scene on the left, Clarissa is effortlessly dressed and wearing a stereotypical apron. She is seemingly effortlessly throwing a complex banquet for several dozen people. When she breaks down in tears later in the scene, it’s not so much the pressure of cooking that triggers it but Lois’ visit and behaviour that dredges up the past.

How does context feature here?

The Hours  comments on the role of women in society in different time periods and the pressures placed upon them:

• In the 1950s, the expectation was that women would be housewives and raise children and keep an immaculately clean home. Queer women were expected to adhere to heteronormative ideals or face ostracism.
• In the 2000s, while women could now have successful careers and queer relationships, they couldn’t escape domestic expectations.

How do I write about this?

There are a couple of ways we can present contextual information around an example from the text. We want to discuss:

When writing a response, there are a couple of different ways you can present information:

Context → Example → Explanation

Example → Context → Explanation

Now let’s look at a couple of examples:

If you want to learn more about The Hours and Mrs Dalloway , read this article .

How do I make sure I ace writing about context?

There are a few key things that top students do to make sure they nail their contextual study essays. If you want to emulate them, you need to:

• Make sure you’ve read or viewed the text multiple times : There is no substitute for detailed knowledge of the text. It always shows in written responses.
• Make notes of your analysis : Don’t just read and write essays, make notes! Students who have detailed notes of Techniques and effects are better positioned to discuss context effectively. Again, this always shows in written responses.
• Do your own research into context : Students who rely on in-class handouts about context or the odd introduction to a set text, lack the insight and breadth of knowledge compared to those students who dig into the background of a text.
• Write practice responses, lots of them : At the end of the day, writing is a craft and skill, you improve through practice. Students who write more essays always perform far better than those who don’t!
• Get feedback : Competent students can muddle through on their own, but exceptional students consistently seek out feedback on their writing and put it into practice in their next effort.

What you should do now is reflect on your own study habits and make a list of what you need to start doing, now , so you can improve your marks.

Written by Matrix English Team

© Matrix Education and www.matrix.edu.au, 2023. Unauthorised use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Matrix Education and www.matrix.edu.au with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.

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How to write about context in literary analysis essays

In literary studies, it’s usually not enough for us to just read and analyse primary texts (e.g. poems, novels, plays etc.)

In order to do well in English Literature, there’s something else called ‘ con text’ that we must also consider.

What is context?

In general, context refers to “the surrounding circumstances that form the setting for an event, statement, or idea, and in terms of which it can be understood” (Lexico). 

In a nutshell, context is just a situation where many things happen. 

So, in literary studies, we can simply understand context as the historical background of a work , and by ‘historical’, that includes economic, social, political, cultural and biographical circumstances . 

Rarely do we come across great literary works which aren’t influenced by their wider contemporary currents, because most authors don’t live or write in a social vacuum, and so are necessarily impacted by the external events and ideas around them. 

For instance, Charles Dickens wrote Hard Times against the backdrop of a post-Industrial Revolution London where capitalist exploitation and urban pollution were rampant; Jane Austen wrote Emma in a society where women cared more about getting married than gaining independence; and Wilfred Owen wrote the poem ‘Dulce et decorum est’ to reflect the horrific conditions suffered by frontline soldiers in WWI. 

There are, of course, writers like the Decadents and Symbolists who believed in ‘art for art’s sake’ , such as Oscar Wilde and Charles Baudelaire, but even as they propounded the theory, their works still reflected social issues and embodied cultural ideas, and so were in no way divorced from the broader context, despite their aesthetic ideologies.

Why does context matter?

If you’re an English Lit student, context matters for two main reasons: 

First, context helps us gain a deeper understanding of the purpose, themes and messages of any literary work, because authors are always inspired by real-life occurrences, and usually, by significant socio-political events and cultural shifts (Yes, even for someone like Henry David Thoreau , who famously decided to live like a hermit in a log cabin by a pond – but it was only for 2 years). 

Second, showing contextual awareness is almost always required for exams. It’s an assessment objective in virtually all English Lit courses, from your I/GCSEs and A-Levels to IB, AP etc.

…You can watch me walk you through the process in the video below!

How to write about context in your literary analysis essays – 3 guiding questions

To incorporate contextual links in your literary analysis, I’ve come up with 3 guiding questions you can consider to navigate the process:

• Given what I know about the historical background of the work, what are some similar events, characters or patterns between the text and the time when the author was writing the text?
• Given the socio-political and/or economic conditions of the author’s context, what would a person similar to the character in the text most likely do, think or feel in that sort of environment?
• Why would the author be so influenced or impacted by what was going on around her to want to write a creative work about it? What is the historical significance of those events?

Let’s now apply these 3 questions to see how we can incorporate contextual links in an analysis.

Example – George Orwell’s Animal Farm

Here’s a paragraph taken from an essay titled ‘How is Napoleon the boar presented in George Orwell’s Animal Farm ?’: 

Throughout the novella, Napoleon is portrayed as a menacing and dictatorial character. After the creation of ‘Animal Farm’, Napoleon engages with Snowball in a vicious power play, and plots a coup d’etat to overthrow his political rival. Napoleon’s plan of fostering a group of dogs as his loyal retinue also reflects his scheming personality, while his readiness to mobilise his canine sentinels against other animals on the farm also shows his cold-blooded and brutal nature. Upon the solidification of his power, Napoleon’s dictatorial colours truly come to light when “he announced that from now on the Sunday-morning Meetings would come to an end”, and that “in future all questions relating to the working of the farm would be settled by a special committee of pigs, presided over by himself” (Chapter 5). This mandate foreshadows the absolute erosion of democratic freedom on Animal Farm, and signals that all animals will eventually be subject to Napoleon’s authoritarian rule. 

In this main body paragraph, the student does a fair job of presenting a focused point (“Napoleon is portrayed as a menacing and dictatorial character”), backing it up with relevant textual evidence (the quote from Ch. 5), and analysing the use of a literary technique (foreshadowing). 

But there’s a missing piece, which is, of course, the contextual link. 

So how can we relate Napoleon’s characterisation to the novella’s historical context? 

To start, we should know that Orwell wrote Animal Farm as a satirical allegory of Stalinist totalitarianism , and that Napoleon is most likely based on Joseph Stalin, who ruled the USSR in a tyrannical fashion at the time when Orwell wrote his book in 1943. 

With that, we can make further use of our 3 guiding questions to help formulate our points:

Both Napoleon and Stalin are tyrannical characters who require absolute subservience from their subjects, and they command authority mostly by spreading mass terror. Like Stalinist Russia, Animal Farm is subject to totalitarian rule with a strong personality cult centered on the supreme leader. 

If someone gained absolute power over a group of obedient followers with no need for moral or social accountability, he would most likely maximise such outsized authority for his own benefit, in addition to suppressing all voices of opposition as a means to secure his rule. 

• Why would the author be so influenced or impacted by what was going on around him to want to write a creative work about it? What is the historical significance of those events?

As a staunch believer in socialist democratic ideals of freedom, liberty and equality, Orwell would have been outraged by the Soviet Union’s blatant suppression of these values (and he was).

In the face of British support for the USSR as a WWII ally, however, Orwell could not have written an explicit critique of Stalin without meeting considerable pushback, which perhaps explains why he had chosen an allegorical format and anthropomorphic approach to characterisation for Animal Farm.  

Now that we’re equipped with all this knowledge, let’s try weaving in the contextual information to upgrade our paragraph: 

Throughout the novella, Napoleon is portrayed as a menacing and dictatorial character. He carries strong echoes of Joseph Stalin, the 1924-1953 Soviet leader who adopted a style of rule known as totalitarianism – a centralised and oppressive government requiring mass subservience, which Orwell, being a socialist democrat, was staunchly opposed to. After the creation of ‘Animal Farm’, Napoleon engages with Snowball in a vicious power play, and plots a coup d’etat to overthrow his political rival. Napoleon’s plan of fostering a group of dogs as his loyal retinue also reflects his scheming personality, while his readiness to mobilise his canine sentinels against other animals on the farm also shows his cold-blooded and brutal nature. Upon the solidification of his power, Napoleon’s dictatorial colours truly come to light when “he announced that from now on the Sunday-morning Meetings would come to an end”, and that “in future all questions relating to the working of the farm would be settled by a special committee of pigs, presided over by himself” (Chapter 5). This mandate foreshadows the absolute erosion of democratic discussion on Animal Farm, and signals that all animals will be subject to the boar’s authoritarian rule. Napoleon’s obsession with absolute power and expulsion of Snowball also mirror Stalin’s purge of Leon Trotsky, who had initially fought alongside Stalin during the Bolshevik Revolution, but was later persecuted and stripped of all government positions by his former comrade-in-arms. 

Notice that in this version, we demonstrate at the very start of the paragraph our awareness of the wider political context which had inspired the novel. 

Specifically, we do this by bringing in the reference to Stalin and drawing an association between the Soviet tyrant and the anthropomorphised tyrant, Napoleon.

This is followed by a point about Orwell’s anti-totalitarian political views, but note that we’re not asserting that Orwell is definitely criticising Stalin via his characterisation of Napoleon. 

Instead, we’re simply suggesting this by stating a piece of contextual fact, i.e. Orwell was a socialist democrat, and socialist democrats hold opposing ideological views to authoritarian fascists. 

At the end of the paragraph, we wrap up with another contextual link that connects Napoleon’s expulsion of Snowball from Animal Farm with a similar political event in Stalinist Russia, which was Stalin’s expulsion of Leon Trotsky from the USSR in 1929. 

Want more study tips on English Lit? Check out my other blog posts below:

• 3 reasons why Frankenstein’s monster deserves our pity
• How to analyse prose passages using Of Mice and Men and Lord of the Flies
• Exploring good versus evil in The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde

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• Scriptwriting

What is Context — Definition and Examples for Writers

• Point of View
• Protagonist
• Deus ex Machina
• Foreshadowing
• Iambic Pentameter
• Juxtaposition
• Personification
• Red Herring
• Alliteration
• Connotation
• Onomatopoeia
• Write Your Script For Free

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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When people use language, their words exist in a specific environment, a unique  context  that plays a role in shaping their meaning. Factors like social norms and cultural beliefs impact how speakers and writers use language and how those around them interpret it. Variables such as where we use certain words and how we communicate them also shape our understanding. The context people use in language is thus critical to understanding the meaning of speech and writing.

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Above all, understanding the context of language helps people understand its _____. 

Harper Lee's offensive language is:

It refers to the time and place where a text was written. 

It  is how words connect to their surrounding society and culture. 

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Meaning of Context in the English Language

In English, the word context refers to the circumstances surrounding language that shape its meaning. The term encompasses physical setting, historical background, and political and socioeconomic factors connected to how people use words.

Context in Writing

Context, context, context.

Written context refers to the circumstances in which a text is situated.

For instance, this includes the time period in which the author wrote the text and the social and political forces that impacted the text. Understanding a text's context helps readers understand its meaning.

For example, if a reader is analyzing George Orwell's book 1984 (1949), they have to consider what was going on in the place and time it was written : the United Kingdom in 1949. During this time, there was widespread social anxiety about the threat of totalitarianism and technological developments. These social fears shaped George Orwell's ideas regarding what the world would look like in the future and led to his novel about a surveilled dystopian society.

Context in Speaking

There's another kind of context, though.

Spoken context refers to the circumstances in which the speech takes place.

The context includes the speaker's physical setting, the surrounding culture, and social circumstances. The context of speech influences how listeners understand what is said.

For example, imagine a woman who wants to break up with her long-time boyfriend. If she chooses to have this important conversation at a loud party, he might not understand the severity of the situation. However, if she sits him down when they are alone in a quiet place, he might realize more quickly that she is serious.

Another famous example of how a speech's context impacts its meaning is Martin Luther King Jr.'s 1963 "I Have a Dream" speech. When analyzing the meaning and significance of this speech, people have to consider the importance of its context: the March on Washington. This march was a large protest in which 250,000 people met in Washington, DC, to resist racial segregation. King gave his speech in front of the Lincoln Memorial, where there is a statue of Abraham Lincoln, the president whose leadership paved the way for the end of slavery. Understanding the historical significance of the speech's location and the social pressures of King's time all shape a listener's understanding of his words.

Importance of Context in Language

There are many reasons why it is important to consider context. Above all, understanding the context of language helps people understand its intended meaning.

For example, consider Harper Lee's novel To Kill A Mockingbird (1960). In this text, Lee uses language that would be considered inappropriate today, such as the N-word. Analyzing the historical context helps readers understand how this word operates in the text.

Lee wrote the novel in 1960, when racial segregation was legal and African American civil rights were an important social and political issue in the United States. There was rampant racism in the American South, especially in small towns like the fictional Maycomb, Alabama. Lee aimed to portray the harsh racism that existed in these towns to tell a story that advocated for the end of systemic racism.

Understanding historical and social context like this helps readers understand the meaning behind Lee's use of offensive language.

Lee's use of the word caused several libraries to ban the book for years. Taken out of context, her use of the N-word is understandably alarming. However, when taken in its appropriate context, readers can understand that Lee was not using that word in an offensive manner herself but rather portraying how racism operated in small Southern towns like the one where her story takes place.

Types of Context in Language

The main types of context in language are historical context, sociocultural context, and situational context.

Historical Context

Everything has a historical context.

Historical context refers to the time and place where a text was written.

It includes the defining circumstances of a historical period, such as how people behaved and what they believed during that time.

For instance, Ernest Hemingway wrote his novel The Sun Also Rises (1926) in the 1920s. The book is about the disillusionment among his post-World War I generation, particularly those who, like him, moved away from the United States to Europe. The characters are cynical, restless, and struggle to find meaning in anything around them. To understand the implications of their behavior, readers have to consider how WWI's brutal historical context changed people's views on life. Knowing this context helps readers understand why the characters struggle to find a purpose.

Sometimes writers set their fiction stories in a different time period than their own. When analyzing such fiction, try to analyze both historical contexts!

Sociocultural Context

Society and culture influence many aspects of human behavior, from how people dress and dance to how they speak and exchange ideas.

In language, sociocultural context is how words connect to their surrounding society and culture.

Understanding how cultural values inform writing or speech is critical to understanding their meaning.

For example, Henry David Thoreau's book Walden (1854) is about his experience retreating to a secluded cabin in the woods. In the text, Thoreau emphasizes the importance of finding meaning in the natural world. He wrote this book in the United States in the 1850s, a time of widespread industrialization when the social value of progress and technological expansion was increasing. Readers who take this sociocultural context into account when analyzing Walden can understand what shaped Thoreau's values and why he communicated them to his reader.

It can sometimes be difficult to distinguish between a text's historical and cultural contexts. While sociocultural context can be connected to historical context, the former encompasses values and behaviors that may exist regardless of the time period. For example, the value of family has been a key aspect of culture in the Southern United States for many years. A text written or set in the American South would have that value embedded in its sociocultural context, no matter its historical context.

Consider what your current sociocultural context is. How does the culture you live in inform how you communicate and write?

Situational Context in the English Language

Another type of context is situational context.

• Situational context refers to the circumstances of a situation that shape the language within it.

For instance, imagine someone is giving a speech in front of their entire school. They might rush their words more than they would in front of just their close friends because they are nervous about public speaking. The speed of the speech could then changes how listeners perceive its meaning. This shows how being in a particular situation can impact how one uses language and how others interpret it.

Examples of Context

Martin Luther King Jr.'s 1963 "Letter from Birmingham Jail" demonstrates the importance of context. In this letter, King responds to eight Birmingham clergymen who published a newspaper article critiquing his demonstrations against racial segregation. This historical context is important because it helps readers understand King's intended audience and what ideas he aimed to address.

King delivers the powerful line in this letter: "Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere."

Another example of the role of context is evident in Lorainne Hansberry's play A Raisin in the Sun (1959). The play is about a working-class African American family who lives in Chicago, Illinois, in the 1950s. They are expecting inheritance money, and each family member has a distinct dream of what to do with it. Their dreams are shaped in part by their sociocultural context.

For instance, the family lives in a patriarchal society in which men are pressured to provide for their families. These social pressures are a key aspect of the oldest son, Walter Lee Younger's sociocultural context, and they impact how he acts and what he represents in the play. He is determined to make a lot of money fast to provide for his family, and he risks everything to do it. The stress of the pressure also takes a toll on his self-esteem and relationships with others.

Understanding the role of his sociocultural context helps the audience learn about the impact of patriarchal expectations in familial relations.

Context - Key Takeaways

• Context refers to the circumstances surrounding a text that shape its meaning.
• Context is important for understanding the meaning of a text.
• Historical context refers to the time and place where a text was written and takes place.
• Sociocultural context is how words connect to their surrounding society and culture.

Flashcards in Context 15

What is context?

Circumstances surrounding language that shape its meaning

What is situational context?

Circumstances of a situation that shape the language within it

What is a text's historical context?

The time and places the text was written in

True or false. Historical context is the same as sociocultural context.  

False. Sociocultural context can include values that exist regardless of the time period.  

What is sociocultural context?

The way that words are connected to their surrounding society and culture

A student is reading George Orwell’s book Animal Farm  (1945) . He analyzes the story of the pigs on the farm in connection with the Russian Revolution. What is he taking into account?

Historical context

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Frequently Asked Questions about Context

What is context in writing?

In writing, context refers to the circumstances in which a text is situated. 

What is an example of a context?

An example of context is how George Orwell wrote 1984 in 1949, a time in which people were worried about the future implications of totalitarianism. 

What does context mean in English literature?

In English literature, context refers to the circumstances that shape the meaning of a text. Context includes elements like the time and place an author wrote a text in. 

What are the types of context in English?

Historical context, sociocultural context, and situational context. 

What is the differences between context in speaking and context in writing?

In writing, context refers to the circumstances in which a text is situated. In speaking, context refers to the circumstances in which the speech takes place. 

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What is a text's historical context?

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How to Write a Contextual Essay

When something is taken out of context, the meaning becomes misconstrued. Since the context of an event is the framework supporting the event, a contextual essay is written with the framework of the event in mind. The event is usually some piece of writing on which you must focus the essay. You can use other writings to add depth to the essay, but only if they fit the context of the first piece of writing. However, contextual essays, like all essays, have an introduction, a body and a conclusion.

Write the introduction based on the action in the piece. This shows that you have identified the context of the writing. Describe the action's importance and how it relates to the whole piece.

Focus on the character, theme and style of the writing as you begin the body of the essay. Write briefly about the main character or characters. What character qualities are revealed by their actions?

Describe the theme of the piece. What kind of response do you think the author expects of the reader? Do they make a statement within the theme?

Define the style of the piece by looking for alliteration or imagery. Is it a dialogue or narrative? Does the author speak in first person? Describe the effect you think the author is trying to achieve.

Conclude the essay by explaining if the author was successful at accomplishing what they set out to do. Did it have a dramatic impact, or was it more like poetry or prose?

• Write down thoughts as they come to you when pouring over the information to help you get started with the writing process. This is called freewriting.
• Never assume given information is correct. Always research it for yourself.
• Harvard University Writing Center: Beginning the Academic Essay

Michael Straessle has written professionally about the construction industry since 1988. He authored “What a Strange Little Man,” among other books, and his work has appeared in various online publications. Straessle earned a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Arkansas at Little Rock in professional/technical writing.

• How to Write a Definition Essay

A definition essay can be deceivingly difficult to write. This type of paper requires you to write a personal yet academic definition of one specific word. The definition must be thorough and lengthy. It is essential that you choose a word that will give you plenty to write about, and there are a few standard tactics you can use to elaborate on the term. Here are a few guidelines to keep in mind when writing a definition essay.

Part 1 of 3: Choosing the Right Word

1: choose an abstract word with a complex meaning. [1].

A simple word that refers to a concrete word will not give you much to write about, but a complex word that refers to an abstract concept provides more material to explore.

• Typically, nouns that refer to a person, place, or thing are too simple for a definition essay. Nouns that refer to an idea work better, however, as do most adjectives.
• For example, the word “house” is fairly simple and an essay written around it may be dull. By switching to something slightly more abstract like “home,” however, you can play around with the definition more. A “home” is a concept, and there are many elements involved in the creation of a “home.” In comparison, a “house” is merely a structure.

2: Make sure that the word is disputable.

Aside from being complex, the word should also refer to something that can mean different things to different people.

• A definition essay is somewhat subjective by nature since it requires you to analyze and define a word from your own perspective. If the answer you come up with after analyzing a word is the same answer anyone else would come up with, your essay may appear to lack depth.

3: Choose a word you have some familiarity with.

Dictionary definitions can only tell you so much. Since you need to elaborate on the word you choose to define, you will need to have your own base of knowledge or experience with the concept you choose.

• For instance, if you have never heard the term “pedantic,” your understanding of the word will be limited. You can introduce yourself to the word for your essay, but without previous understanding of the concept, you will not know if the definition you describe is truly fitting.

4: Read the dictionary definition.

While you will not be relying completely on the dictionary definition for your essay, familiarizing yourself with the official definition will allow you to compare your own understanding of the concept with the simplest, most academic explanation of it.

• As an example, one definition of “friend” is “a person attached to another by feelings of affection or personal regard.” [2] Your own ideas or beliefs about what a “friend” really is likely include much more information, but this basic definition can present you with a good starting point in forming your own.

5:  Research the word’s origins.

Look up your chosen word in the Oxford English Dictionary or in another etymology dictionary. [3]

• These sources can tell you the history behind a word, which can provide further insight on a general definition as well as information about how a word came to mean what it means today.

Part 2 of 3: Potential Elements of an Effective Definition

1: write an analysis. [4].

Separate a word into various parts. Analyze and define each part in its own paragraph.

• You can separate “return” into “re-” and “turn.” The word “friendship” can be separated into “friend” and “ship.”
• In order to analyze each portion of a word, you will still need to use additional defining tactics like negation and classification.
• Note that this tactic only works for words that contain multiple parts. The word “love,” for instance, cannot be broken down any further. If defining “platonic love,” though, you could define both “platonic” and “love” separately within your essay.

2:  Classify the term.

Specify what classes and parts of speech a word belongs to according to a standard dictionary definition.

• While this information is very basic and dry, it can provide helpful context about the way that a given word is used.

3: Compare an unfamiliar term to something familiar.

An unfamiliar or uncommon concept can be explained using concepts that are more accessible to the average person.

• Many people have never heard of the term “confrere,” for instance. One basic definition is “a fellow member of a profession, fraternity, etc.” As such, you could compare “confrere” with “colleague,” which is a similar yet more familiar concept. [5]

4:  Provide traditional details about the term.

Explain any physical characteristics or traditional thoughts used to describe your term of choice.

• The term “home” is often visualized physically as a house or apartment. In more abstract terms, “home” is traditionally thought to be a warm, cozy, and safe environment. You can include all of these features in a definition essay on “home.”

5: Use examples to illustrate the meaning.

People often relate to stories and vivid images, so using a fitting story or image that relates to the term can be used in clarifying an abstract, formless concept.

• In a definition essay about “kindness,” for example, you could write about an act of kindness you recently witnessed. Someone who mows the lawn of an elderly neighbor is a valid example, just as someone who gave you an encouraging word when you were feeling down might be.

6: Use negation to explain what the term does not mean.

If a term is often misused or misunderstood, mentioning what it is not is an effective way to bring the concept into focus.

• A common example would be the term “courage.” The term is often associated with a lack of fear, but many will argue that “courage” is more accurately described as acting in spite of fear.

7: Provide background information.

This is when your research about the etymology of a word will come in handy. Explain where the term originated and how it came to mean what it currently means.

Part 3 of 3: Definition Essay Structure

1: introduce the standard definition..

You need to clearly state what your word is along with its traditional or dictionary definition in your introductory paragraph.

• By opening with the dictionary definition of your term, you create context and a basic level of knowledge about the word. This will allow you to introduce and elaborate on your own definition.
• This is especially significant when the traditional definition of your term varies from your own definition in notable ways.

2: Define the term in your own words in your thesis.

Your actual thesis statement should define the term in your own words.

• Keep the definition in your thesis brief and basic. You will elaborate on it more in the body of your paper.
• Avoid using passive phrases involving the word “is” when defining your term. The phrases “is where” and “is when” are especially clunky. [6]
• Do not repeat part of the defined term in your definition.

3:  Separate different parts of the definition into separate paragraphs.

Each tactic or method used to define your term should be explored in a separate paragraph.

• Note that you do not need to use all the possible methods of defining a term in your essay. You should use a variety of different methods in order to create a full, well-rounded picture of the term, but some tactics will work great with some terms but not with others.

4: Conclude with a summary of your main points.

Briefly summarize your main points around the start of your concluding paragraph.

• This summary does not need to be elaborate. Usually, looking at the topic sentence of each body paragraph is a good way to form a simple list of your main points.
• You can also draw the essay to a close by referring to phrases or images evoked in your introduction.

5: Mention how the definition has affected you, if desired.

If the term you define plays a part in your own life and experiences, your final concluding remarks are a good place to briefly mention the role it plays.

• Relate your experience with the term to the definition you created for it in your thesis. Avoid sharing experiences that relate to the term but contradict everything you wrote in your essay.

Sources and Citations

• http://www.roanestate.edu/owl/Definition.html
• http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/friend?s=t
• http://www.etymonline.com/
• http://leo.stcloudstate.edu/acadwrite/definition.html
• http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/confrere?s=t
• http://grammar.ccc.commnet.edu/grammar/composition/definition.htm
• How to Write a Definition Essay. Provided by : WikiHow. Located at : http://www.wikihow.com/Write-a-Definition-Essay . License : CC BY-NC-SA: Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike
• Table of Contents

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An Overview of the Writing Process

• Introduction to the Writing Process
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Definition Essay

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• Student Sample: Definition Essay

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• "Shooting an Elephant" by George Orwell
• "Sixty-nine Cents" by Gary Shteyngart
• Video: The Danger of a Single Story
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• "April & Paris" by David Sedaris
• Writing for Success: Illustration/Example
• Student Sample: Illustration/Example Essay

Compare/Contrast Essay

• Introduction to Compare/Contrast Essay
• "Disability" by Nancy Mairs
• "Friending, Ancient or Otherwise" by Alex Wright
• "A South African Storm" by Allison Howard
• Writing for Success: Compare/Contrast
• Student Sample: Compare/Contrast Essay

Cause-and-Effect Essay

• Introduction to Cause-and-Effect Essay
• "Cultural Baggage" by Barbara Ehrenreich
• "Women in Science" by K.C. Cole
• Writing for Success: Cause and Effect
• Student Sample: Cause-and-Effect Essay

Argument Essay

• Introduction to Argument Essay
• Rogerian Argument
• "The Case Against Torture," by Alisa Soloman
• "The Case for Torture" by Michael Levin
• How to Write a Summary by Paraphrasing Source Material
• Writing for Success: Argument
• Student Sample: Argument Essay
• Grammar/Mechanics Mini-lessons
• Mini-lesson: Subjects and Verbs, Irregular Verbs, Subject Verb Agreement
• Mini-lesson: Sentence Types
• Mini-lesson: Fragments I
• Mini-lesson: Run-ons and Comma Splices I
• Mini-lesson: Comma Usage
• Mini-lesson: Parallelism
• Mini-lesson: The Apostrophe
• Mini-lesson: Capital Letters
• Grammar Practice - Interactive Quizzes
• De Copia - Demonstration of the Variety of Language
• Style Exercise: Voice

Write an effective context statement with easy tips

Learn about context statements and how they may assist you in getting admitted to your Master’s or PhD program.

A solid context statement can assist the committee of a PhD or Master’s program in learning important aspects about who you are in an interesting and memorable manner. And delivering an excellent context statement may leave a lasting favorable impact. 

In this article, you’ll learn what a context statement is, how to write one step by step, and see examples to help you create your own effective context statement.

What is the context statement?

A context statement is a brief introduction about yourself that defines your obligations and responsibilities in the academic field, such as teaching or assisting learning at the high education level. Writing an excellent context statement for a Master’s or PhD application to an institution is likely one of the most essential steps in your admission process.

The goal of a context statement isn’t merely to highlight your research interests, accomplishments, or other academic achievements. In reality, its goal is to persuade the reader of the significance of your accomplished work and the possible effect of your future academic trajectory. In other words, professionals must write logically about their previous and current efforts and explain their future intentions clearly. 

Tips on writing a context statement

• Make your context statement easy to read
• Use headers and subheadings to organize your thoughts;
• Different sections should be adequately separated;
• Avoid writing extensive paragraphs;
• A succinct yet well-thought-out context statement indicates your ability to organize ideas in a clear and easy-to-read approach.
• Outline your main achievements
• Describe how your achievements led you to where you are; 
• Mention how your achievements are relevant to the program you are applying to;
• Write your accomplishments modestly, without exaggerating or fabricating.
• Communicate properly
• Even at the most prestigious institutions, not all members of the selection committee may be aware of your professional intricacies. In a conclusion, remove jargon or unnecessary complexities;
• Rather of overwhelming the reader with finer details, your goal should be to build trust in them that you are a competent academic candidate;

What distinguishes a Context Statement from a CV?

Although your CV provides a summary of your previous academic efforts, it does not go into depth about your academic career. Furthermore, a CV fails to address several concerns that a context statement may simply answer:

• What drew you to a specific position? 
• What is the significance of this achievement? 
• What methods do you employ? 
• What contributions have you made?
• How is this relevant to your future goals?
• Why should we consider you for this program?

Examples of context statements:

• “I am a Psychologist Student at Harvard University aiming to improve our knowledge of individual judgment. I conduct field, lab, and lab-in-the-field research, create survey tools, and analyze large panel data sets to better understand the base of the individual judgment, yielding insights for both theory and real-world scenarios.”
• “During my master’s degree in English Literature, I concentrated on storytelling and modern literature. During my Master’s Student years, I spent my days offering exciting new perspectives for applying different methods and domains in the study of modern literature. As I used my findings in a more specialized towards radicalism focused sector, I pursued a second master’s degree in realism. I found out that my findings in radicalism studies provided me with a viewpoint that my more realism minded peers lacked. Using this unique perspective, I am currently attempting to further my master’s dissertation study into a PhD thesis.”
• “I am a third-year Medical Student at the University of Copenhagen. Over the previous two years, I’ve been active in a variety of teaching and learning support initiatives in the Medical and Health Sciences. In years 1 and 2, I teach seminars for groups of 10-15 undergraduate students studying Anatomy. These are generally one to two hours long and allow for more in-depth study of certain issues. Despite the fact that the seminar schedule and topics are set, I develop my own teaching materials with the help of the academic staff.”

Transform your lectures, meetings and classes into high-impact visual experiences

Did you know you can make your lectures, meetings, and classes far more understandable and absorbable? Including visual elements in your content may assist you not only get the comprehension of your audience but also provide you with a lot of value and authority. Learn about Mind The Graph , a tool that provides you with a large portfolio of templates with the purpose of improving your work.

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Definition Essay

Definition Essay - Writing Guide, Examples and Tips

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Published on: Oct 9, 2020

Last updated on: Jan 31, 2024

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Many students struggle with writing definition essays due to a lack of clarity and precision in their explanations.

This obstructs them from effectively conveying the essence of the terms or concepts they are tasked with defining. Consequently, the essays may lack coherence, leaving readers confused and preventing them from grasping the intended meaning.

But don’t worry!

In this guide, we will delve into effective techniques and step-by-step approaches to help students craft an engaging definition essay.

Continue reading to learn the correct formation of a definition essay. 

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What is a Definition Essay?

Just as the name suggests, a definition essay defines and explains a term or a concept. Unlike a narrative essay, the purpose of writing this essay is only to inform the readers.

Writing this essay type can be deceivingly tricky. Some terms, concepts, and objects have concrete definitions when explained. In contrast others are solely based on the writer’s understanding and point of view.

A definition essay requires a writer to use different approaches when discussing a term. These approaches are the following:

• Denotation - It is when you provide a literal or academic definition of the term.
• Connotation - It is when the writer provides an implied meaning or definition of the term.
• Enumeration - For this approach, a list is employed to define a term or a concept.
• Analogy - It is a technique in which something is defined by implementing a comparison.
• Negation - It is when you define a term by stating what it is not.

A single or combination of approaches can be used in the essay. 

Definition Essay Types

There are several types of definition essays that you may be asked to write, depending on the purpose and scope of the assignment. 

In this section, we will discuss some of the most common types of definition essays.

Descriptive Definition Essay 

This type of essay provides a detailed description of a term or concept, emphasizing its key features and characteristics. 

The goal of a descriptive definition essay is to help readers understand the term or concept in a more profound way.

Stipulative Definition Essay 

In a stipulative definition essay, the writer provides a unique definition of a term or concept. This type of essay is often used in academic settings to define a term in a particular field of study. 

The goal of a stipulative definition essay is to provide a precise and clear definition that is specific to the context of the essay.

Analytical Definition Essay 

This compare and contrast essay type involves analyzing a term or concept in-depth. Breaking it down into its component parts, and examining how they relate to each other. 

The goal of an analytical definition essay is to provide a more nuanced and detailed understanding of the term or concept being discussed.

Persuasive Definition Essay 

A persuasive definition essay is an argumentative essay that aims to persuade readers to accept a particular definition of a term or concept.

The writer presents their argument for the definition and uses evidence and examples to support their position.

Explanatory Definition Essay 

An explanatory definition essay is a type of expository essay . It aims to explain a complex term or concept in a way that is easy to understand for the reader. 

The writer breaks down the term or concept into simpler parts and provides examples and analogies to help readers understand it better.

Extended Definition Essay 

An extended definition essay goes beyond the definition of a word or concept and provides a more in-depth analysis and explanation. 

The goal of an extended definition essay is to provide a comprehensive understanding of a term, concept, or idea. This includes its history, origins, and cultural significance. 

How to Write a Definition Essay?

Writing a definition essay is simple if you know the correct procedure. This essay, like all the other formal pieces of documents, requires substantial planning and effective execution.

The following are the steps involved in writing a definition essay effectively:

Instead of choosing a term that has a concrete definition available, choose a word that is complicated . Complex expressions have abstract concepts that require a writer to explore deeper. Moreover, make sure that different people perceive the term selected differently. 

Once you have a word to draft your definition essay for, read the dictionary. These academic definitions are important as you can use them to compare your understanding with the official concept.

Drafting a definition essay is about stating the dictionary meaning and your explanation of the concept. So the writer needs to have some information about the term.

In addition to this, when exploring the term, make sure to check the term’s origin. The history of the word can make you discuss it in a better way.

Coming up with an exciting title for your essay is important. The essay topic will be the first thing that your readers will witness, so it should be catchy.

Creatively draft an essay topic that reflects meaning. In addition to this, the usage of the term in the title should be correctly done. The readers should get an idea of what the essay is about and what to expect from the document.

Now that you have a topic in hand, it is time to gather some relevant information. A definition essay is more than a mere explanation of the term. It represents the writer’s perception of the chosen term and the topic.

So having only personal opinions will not be enough to defend your point. Deeply research and gather information by consulting credible sources.

The gathered information needs to be organized to be understandable. The raw data needs to be arranged to give a structure to the content.

Here's a generic outline for a definition essay:

Are you searching for an in-depth guide on crafting a well-structured definition essay?Check out this definition essay outline blog!

6. Write the First Draft

Drafting each section correctly is a daunting task. Understanding what or what not to include in these sections requires a writer to choose wisely.

The start of your essay matters a lot. If it is on point and attractive, the readers will want to read the text. As the first part of the essay is the introduction , it is considered the first impression of your essay.

To write your definition essay introduction effectively, include the following information:

• Start your essay with a catchy hook statement that is related to the topic and the term chosen.
• State the generally known definition of the term. If the word chosen has multiple interpretations, select the most common one.
• Provide background information precisely. Determine the origin of the term and other relevant information.
• Shed light on the other unconventional concepts and definitions related to the term.
• Decide on the side or stance you want to pick in your essay and develop a thesis statement .

After briefly introducing the topic, fully explain the concept in the body section . Provide all the details and evidence that will support the thesis statement. To draft this section professionally, add the following information:

• A detailed explanation of the history of the term.
• Analysis of the dictionary meaning and usage of the term.
• A comparison and reflection of personal understanding and the researched data on the concept.

Once all the details are shared, give closure to your discussion. The last paragraph of the definition essay is the conclusion . The writer provides insight into the topic as a conclusion.

The concluding paragraphs include the following material:

• Summary of the important points.
• Restated thesis statement.
• A final verdict on the topic.

7. Proofread and Edit

Although the writing process ends with the concluding paragraph, there is an additional step. It is important to proofread the essay once you are done writing. Proofread and revise your document a couple of times to make sure everything is perfect.

Before submitting your assignment, make edits, and fix all mistakes and errors.

If you want to learn more about how to write a definition essay, here is a video guide for you!

Definition Essay Structure 

The structure of a definition essay is similar to that of any other academic essay. It should consist of an introduction, body paragraphs, and a conclusion. 

However, the focus of a definition essay is on defining and explaining a particular term or concept. 

In this section, we will discuss the structure of a definition essay in detail.

Introduction 

Get the idea of writing an introduction for a definition essay with this example:

Body Paragraphs

Here is an example of how to craft your definition essay body paragraph:

Types of the Term/Concept 

If applicable, the writer may want to include a section that discusses the different types or categories of the term or concept being defined. 

This section should explain the similarities and differences between the types, using examples and anecdotes to illustrate the points.

Examples of the Term/Concept in Action 

The writer should also include real-life examples of the term or concept being defined in action. 

This will help the reader better understand the term or concept in context and how it is used in everyday life.

Conclusion 

This example will help you writing a conclusion fo you essay:

Definition Essay Examples

It is important to go through some examples and samples before writing an essay. This is to understand the writing process and structure of the assigned task well.

Following are some examples of definition essays to give our students a better idea of the concept. 

Understanding the Definition Essay

Definition Essay Example

Definition Essay About Friendship

Definition Essay About Love

Family Definition Essay

Success Definition Essay

Beauty Definition Essay

Definition Essay Topics

Selecting the right topic is challenging for other essay types. However, picking a suitable theme for a definition essay is equally tricky yet important. Pick an interesting subject to ensure maximum readership.

If you are facing writer’s block, here is a list of some great definition essay topics for your help. Choose from the list below and draft a compelling essay.

• Authenticity
• Sustainability
• Mindfulness

Here are some more extended definition essay topics:

• Social media addiction
• Ethical implications of gene editing
• Personalized learning in the digital age
• Ecosystem services
• Cultural assimilation versus cultural preservation
• Sustainable fashion
• Gender equality in the workplace
• Financial literacy and its impact on personal finance
• Ethical considerations in artificial intelligence
• Welfare state and social safety nets

Need more topics? Check out this definition essay topics blog!

Definition Essay Writing Tips

Knowing the correct writing procedure is not enough if you are not aware of the essay’s small technicalities. To help students write a definition essay effortlessly, expert writers of CollegeEssay.org have gathered some simple tips.

These easy tips will make your assignment writing phase easy.

• Choose an exciting yet informative topic for your essay.
• When selecting the word, concept, or term for your essay, make sure you have the knowledge.
• When consulting a dictionary for the definition, provide proper referencing as there are many choices available.
• To make the essay informative and credible, always provide the origin and history of the term.
• Highlight different meanings and interpretations of the term.
• Discuss the transitions and evolution in the meaning of the term in any.
• Provide your perspective and point of view on the chosen term.

Following these tips will guarantee you better grades in your academics.

By following the step-by-step approach explained in this guide, you will acquire the skills to craft an outstanding essay. 

Struggling with the thought, " write my college essay for m e"? Look no further.

Our dedicated definition essay writing service is here to craft the perfect essay that meets your academic needs.

For an extra edge, explore our AI essay writer , a tool designed to refine your essays to perfection. 

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Barbara is a highly educated and qualified author with a Ph.D. in public health from an Ivy League university. She has spent a significant amount of time working in the medical field, conducting a thorough study on a variety of health issues. Her work has been published in several major publications.

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• How to Write a Thesis Statement | 4 Steps & Examples

How to Write a Thesis Statement | 4 Steps & Examples

Published on January 11, 2019 by Shona McCombes . Revised on August 15, 2023 by Eoghan Ryan.

A thesis statement is a sentence that sums up the central point of your paper or essay . It usually comes near the end of your introduction .

Your thesis will look a bit different depending on the type of essay you’re writing. But the thesis statement should always clearly state the main idea you want to get across. Everything else in your essay should relate back to this idea.

You can write your thesis statement by following four simple steps:

• Start with a question
• Write your initial answer
• Develop your answer
• Refine your thesis statement

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Table of contents

What is a thesis statement, placement of the thesis statement, step 1: start with a question, step 2: write your initial answer, step 3: develop your answer, step 4: refine your thesis statement, types of thesis statements, other interesting articles, frequently asked questions about thesis statements.

A thesis statement summarizes the central points of your essay. It is a signpost telling the reader what the essay will argue and why.

The best thesis statements are:

• Concise: A good thesis statement is short and sweet—don’t use more words than necessary. State your point clearly and directly in one or two sentences.
• Contentious: Your thesis shouldn’t be a simple statement of fact that everyone already knows. A good thesis statement is a claim that requires further evidence or analysis to back it up.
• Coherent: Everything mentioned in your thesis statement must be supported and explained in the rest of your paper.

Prevent plagiarism. Run a free check.

The thesis statement generally appears at the end of your essay introduction or research paper introduction .

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 and among young people more generally is hotly debated. For many 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 many benefits for education: the internet facilitates easier access to information, exposure to different perspectives, and a flexible learning environment for both students and teachers.

You should come up with an initial thesis, sometimes called a working thesis , early in the writing process . As soon as you’ve decided on your essay topic , you need to work out what you want to say about it—a clear thesis will give your essay direction and structure.

You might already have a question in your assignment, but if not, try to come up with your own. What would you like to find out or decide about your topic?

For example, you might ask:

After some initial research, you can formulate a tentative answer to this question. At this stage it can be simple, and it should guide the research process and writing process .

Now you need to consider why this is your answer and how you will convince your reader to agree with you. As you read more about your topic and begin writing, your answer should get more detailed.

In your essay about the internet and education, the thesis states your position and sketches out the key arguments you’ll use to support it.

The negatives of internet use are outweighed by its many benefits for education because it facilitates easier access to information.

In your essay about braille, the thesis statement summarizes the key historical development that you’ll explain.

The invention of braille in the 19th century transformed the lives of blind people, allowing them to participate more actively in public life.

A strong thesis statement should tell the reader:

• Why you hold this position
• What they’ll learn from your essay
• The key points of your argument or narrative

The final thesis statement doesn’t just state your position, but summarizes your overall argument or the entire topic you’re going to explain. To strengthen a weak thesis statement, it can help to consider the broader context of your topic.

These examples are more specific and show that you’ll explore your topic in depth.

Your thesis statement should match the goals of your essay, which vary depending on the type of essay you’re writing:

• In an argumentative essay , your thesis statement should take a strong position. Your aim in the essay is to convince your reader of this thesis based on evidence and logical reasoning.
• In an expository essay , you’ll aim to explain the facts of a topic or process. Your thesis statement doesn’t have to include a strong opinion in this case, but it should clearly state the central point you want to make, and mention the key elements you’ll explain.

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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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.

Follow these four steps to come up with a thesis statement :

• Ask a question about your topic .
• Write your initial answer.
• Develop your answer by including reasons.
• Refine your answer, adding more detail and nuance.

The thesis statement should be placed at the end of your essay introduction .

Cite this Scribbr article

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McCombes, S. (2023, August 15). How to Write a Thesis Statement | 4 Steps & Examples. Scribbr. Retrieved September 4, 2024, from https://www.scribbr.com/academic-essay/thesis-statement/

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What is an equivalent to saying "for the purpose of this essay"? [closed]

I cannot think of another formal way to say "for the purpose of this essay." The following sentence shows some context:

For the purpose of this essay, it is not necessary to dwell any further on particular conditions...

• expressions

4 Answers 4

I agree the phrase is worth avoiding; but avoiding it does not require any substitute. The sample sentence of which you offer the first part almost certainly deserves to be deleted entirely during revision. Resist temptations to talk about your essay within your essay. (One exception might be a partitio or divisio section offering an advance road-map to a particularly complicated argument.)

You could use a phrase similar to "outside the scope of this essay"

• Welcome to English Language & Usage @Anon. When you have enough rep such a short post could be made as a comment. –  user63230 Commented Dec 1, 2014 at 1:04

The English adverb herein may serve. From en.wiktionary , it means “Within this content, context, or thing”. You could say:

it is not necessary to dwell herein any further on particular conditions

or could say

Those conditions need not be considered here

but for brevity might instead say “I'll say no more of this now” or use an old standby, “But I digress”.

Of course, as Brian Donovan has noted in an answer, there's little need in an essay – a fairly short work – for such a sentence at all.

I sometimes say:

For present purposes

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged expressions synonyms or ask your own question .

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Why A.I. Isn’t Going to Make Art

In 1953, Roald Dahl published “ The Great Automatic Grammatizator ,” a short story about an electrical engineer who secretly desires to be a writer. One day, after completing construction of the world’s fastest calculating machine, the engineer realizes that “English grammar is governed by rules that are almost mathematical in their strictness.” He constructs a fiction-writing machine that can produce a five-thousand-word short story in thirty seconds; a novel takes fifteen minutes and requires the operator to manipulate handles and foot pedals, as if he were driving a car or playing an organ, to regulate the levels of humor and pathos. The resulting novels are so popular that, within a year, half the fiction published in English is a product of the engineer’s invention.

Is there anything about art that makes us think it can’t be created by pushing a button, as in Dahl’s imagination? Right now, the fiction generated by large language models like ChatGPT is terrible, but one can imagine that such programs might improve in the future. How good could they get? Could they get better than humans at writing fiction—or making paintings or movies—in the same way that calculators are better at addition and subtraction?

Art is notoriously hard to define, and so are the differences between good art and bad art. But let me offer a generalization: art is something that results from making a lot of choices. This might be easiest to explain if we use fiction writing as an example. When you are writing fiction, you are—consciously or unconsciously—making a choice about almost every word you type; to oversimplify, we can imagine that a ten-thousand-word short story requires something on the order of ten thousand choices. When you give a generative-A.I. program a prompt, you are making very few choices; if you supply a hundred-word prompt, you have made on the order of a hundred choices.

If an A.I. generates a ten-thousand-word story based on your prompt, it has to fill in for all of the choices that you are not making. There are various ways it can do this. One is to take an average of the choices that other writers have made, as represented by text found on the Internet; that average is equivalent to the least interesting choices possible, which is why A.I.-generated text is often really bland. Another is to instruct the program to engage in style mimicry, emulating the choices made by a specific writer, which produces a highly derivative story. In neither case is it creating interesting art.

I think the same underlying principle applies to visual art, although it’s harder to quantify the choices that a painter might make. Real paintings bear the mark of an enormous number of decisions. By comparison, a person using a text-to-image program like DALL-E enters a prompt such as “A knight in a suit of armor fights a fire-breathing dragon,” and lets the program do the rest. (The newest version of DALL-E accepts prompts of up to four thousand characters—hundreds of words, but not enough to describe every detail of a scene.) Most of the choices in the resulting image have to be borrowed from similar paintings found online; the image might be exquisitely rendered, but the person entering the prompt can’t claim credit for that.

Some commentators imagine that image generators will affect visual culture as much as the advent of photography once did. Although this might seem superficially plausible, the idea that photography is similar to generative A.I. deserves closer examination. When photography was first developed, I suspect it didn’t seem like an artistic medium because it wasn’t apparent that there were a lot of choices to be made; you just set up the camera and start the exposure. But over time people realized that there were a vast number of things you could do with cameras, and the artistry lies in the many choices that a photographer makes. It might not always be easy to articulate what the choices are, but when you compare an amateur’s photos to a professional’s, you can see the difference. So then the question becomes: Is there a similar opportunity to make a vast number of choices using a text-to-image generator? I think the answer is no. An artist—whether working digitally or with paint—implicitly makes far more decisions during the process of making a painting than would fit into a text prompt of a few hundred words.

We can imagine a text-to-image generator that, over the course of many sessions, lets you enter tens of thousands of words into its text box to enable extremely fine-grained control over the image you’re producing; this would be something analogous to Photoshop with a purely textual interface. I’d say that a person could use such a program and still deserve to be called an artist. The film director Bennett Miller has used DALL-E 2 to generate some very striking images that have been exhibited at the Gagosian gallery; to create them, he crafted detailed text prompts and then instructed DALL-E to revise and manipulate the generated images again and again. He generated more than a hundred thousand images to arrive at the twenty images in the exhibit. But he has said that he hasn’t been able to obtain comparable results on later releases of DALL-E . I suspect this might be because Miller was using DALL-E for something it’s not intended to do; it’s as if he hacked Microsoft Paint to make it behave like Photoshop, but as soon as a new version of Paint was released, his hacks stopped working. OpenAI probably isn’t trying to build a product to serve users like Miller, because a product that requires a user to work for months to create an image isn’t appealing to a wide audience. The company wants to offer a product that generates images with little effort.

It’s harder to imagine a program that, over many sessions, helps you write a good novel. This hypothetical writing program might require you to enter a hundred thousand words of prompts in order for it to generate an entirely different hundred thousand words that make up the novel you’re envisioning. It’s not clear to me what such a program would look like. Theoretically, if such a program existed, the user could perhaps deserve to be called the author. But, again, I don’t think companies like OpenAI want to create versions of ChatGPT that require just as much effort from users as writing a novel from scratch. The selling point of generative A.I. is that these programs generate vastly more than you put into them, and that is precisely what prevents them from being effective tools for artists.

The companies promoting generative-A.I. programs claim that they will unleash creativity. In essence, they are saying that art can be all inspiration and no perspiration—but these things cannot be easily separated. I’m not saying that art has to involve tedium. What I’m saying is that art requires making choices at every scale; the countless small-scale choices made during implementation are just as important to the final product as the few large-scale choices made during the conception. It is a mistake to equate “large-scale” with “important” when it comes to the choices made when creating art; the interrelationship between the large scale and the small scale is where the artistry lies.

Believing that inspiration outweighs everything else is, I suspect, a sign that someone is unfamiliar with the medium. I contend that this is true even if one’s goal is to create entertainment rather than high art. People often underestimate the effort required to entertain; a thriller novel may not live up to Kafka’s ideal of a book—an “axe for the frozen sea within us”—but it can still be as finely crafted as a Swiss watch. And an effective thriller is more than its premise or its plot. I doubt you could replace every sentence in a thriller with one that is semantically equivalent and have the resulting novel be as entertaining. This means that its sentences—and the small-scale choices they represent—help to determine the thriller’s effectiveness.

Many novelists have had the experience of being approached by someone convinced that they have a great idea for a novel, which they are willing to share in exchange for a fifty-fifty split of the proceeds. Such a person inadvertently reveals that they think formulating sentences is a nuisance rather than a fundamental part of storytelling in prose. Generative A.I. appeals to people who think they can express themselves in a medium without actually working in that medium. But the creators of traditional novels, paintings, and films are drawn to those art forms because they see the unique expressive potential that each medium affords. It is their eagerness to take full advantage of those potentialities that makes their work satisfying, whether as entertainment or as art.

Of course, most pieces of writing, whether articles or reports or e-mails, do not come with the expectation that they embody thousands of choices. In such cases, is there any harm in automating the task? Let me offer another generalization: any writing that deserves your attention as a reader is the result of effort expended by the person who wrote it. Effort during the writing process doesn’t guarantee the end product is worth reading, but worthwhile work cannot be made without it. The type of attention you pay when reading a personal e-mail is different from the type you pay when reading a business report, but in both cases it is only warranted when the writer put some thought into it.

Recently, Google aired a commercial during the Paris Olympics for Gemini, its competitor to OpenAI’s GPT-4 . The ad shows a father using Gemini to compose a fan letter, which his daughter will send to an Olympic athlete who inspires her. Google pulled the commercial after widespread backlash from viewers; a media professor called it “one of the most disturbing commercials I’ve ever seen.” It’s notable that people reacted this way, even though artistic creativity wasn’t the attribute being supplanted. No one expects a child’s fan letter to an athlete to be extraordinary; if the young girl had written the letter herself, it would likely have been indistinguishable from countless others. The significance of a child’s fan letter—both to the child who writes it and to the athlete who receives it—comes from its being heartfelt rather than from its being eloquent.

Many of us have sent store-bought greeting cards, knowing that it will be clear to the recipient that we didn’t compose the words ourselves. We don’t copy the words from a Hallmark card in our own handwriting, because that would feel dishonest. The programmer Simon Willison has described the training for large language models as “money laundering for copyrighted data,” which I find a useful way to think about the appeal of generative-A.I. programs: they let you engage in something like plagiarism, but there’s no guilt associated with it because it’s not clear even to you that you’re copying.

Some have claimed that large language models are not laundering the texts they’re trained on but, rather, learning from them, in the same way that human writers learn from the books they’ve read. But a large language model is not a writer; it’s not even a user of language. Language is, by definition, a system of communication, and it requires an intention to communicate. Your phone’s auto-complete may offer good suggestions or bad ones, but in neither case is it trying to say anything to you or the person you’re texting. The fact that ChatGPT can generate coherent sentences invites us to imagine that it understands language in a way that your phone’s auto-complete does not, but it has no more intention to communicate.

It is very easy to get ChatGPT to emit a series of words such as “I am happy to see you.” There are many things we don’t understand about how large language models work, but one thing we can be sure of is that ChatGPT is not happy to see you. A dog can communicate that it is happy to see you, and so can a prelinguistic child, even though both lack the capability to use words. ChatGPT feels nothing and desires nothing, and this lack of intention is why ChatGPT is not actually using language. What makes the words “I’m happy to see you” a linguistic utterance is not that the sequence of text tokens that it is made up of are well formed; what makes it a linguistic utterance is the intention to communicate something.

Because language comes so easily to us, it’s easy to forget that it lies on top of these other experiences of subjective feeling and of wanting to communicate that feeling. We’re tempted to project those experiences onto a large language model when it emits coherent sentences, but to do so is to fall prey to mimicry; it’s the same phenomenon as when butterflies evolve large dark spots on their wings that can fool birds into thinking they’re predators with big eyes. There is a context in which the dark spots are sufficient; birds are less likely to eat a butterfly that has them, and the butterfly doesn’t really care why it’s not being eaten, as long as it gets to live. But there is a big difference between a butterfly and a predator that poses a threat to a bird.

A person using generative A.I. to help them write might claim that they are drawing inspiration from the texts the model was trained on, but I would again argue that this differs from what we usually mean when we say one writer draws inspiration from another. Consider a college student who turns in a paper that consists solely of a five-page quotation from a book, stating that this quotation conveys exactly what she wanted to say, better than she could say it herself. Even if the student is completely candid with the instructor about what she’s done, it’s not accurate to say that she is drawing inspiration from the book she’s citing. The fact that a large language model can reword the quotation enough that the source is unidentifiable doesn’t change the fundamental nature of what’s going on.

As the linguist Emily M. Bender has noted, teachers don’t ask students to write essays because the world needs more student essays. The point of writing essays is to strengthen students’ critical-thinking skills; in the same way that lifting weights is useful no matter what sport an athlete plays, writing essays develops skills necessary for whatever job a college student will eventually get. Using ChatGPT to complete assignments is like bringing a forklift into the weight room; you will never improve your cognitive fitness that way.

Not all writing needs to be creative, or heartfelt, or even particularly good; sometimes it simply needs to exist. Such writing might support other goals, such as attracting views for advertising or satisfying bureaucratic requirements. When people are required to produce such text, we can hardly blame them for using whatever tools are available to accelerate the process. But is the world better off with more documents that have had minimal effort expended on them? It would be unrealistic to claim that if we refuse to use large language models, then the requirements to create low-quality text will disappear. However, I think it is inevitable that the more we use large language models to fulfill those requirements, the greater those requirements will eventually become. We are entering an era where someone might use a large language model to generate a document out of a bulleted list, and send it to a person who will use a large language model to condense that document into a bulleted list. Can anyone seriously argue that this is an improvement?

It’s not impossible that one day we will have computer programs that can do anything a human being can do, but, contrary to the claims of the companies promoting A.I., that is not something we’ll see in the next few years. Even in domains that have absolutely nothing to do with creativity, current A.I. programs have profound limitations that give us legitimate reasons to question whether they deserve to be called intelligent at all.

The computer scientist François Chollet has proposed the following distinction: skill is how well you perform at a task, while intelligence is how efficiently you gain new skills. I think this reflects our intuitions about human beings pretty well. Most people can learn a new skill given sufficient practice, but the faster the person picks up the skill, the more intelligent we think the person is. What’s interesting about this definition is that—unlike I.Q. tests—it’s also applicable to nonhuman entities; when a dog learns a new trick quickly, we consider that a sign of intelligence.

In 2019, researchers conducted an experiment in which they taught rats how to drive. They put the rats in little plastic containers with three copper-wire bars; when the mice put their paws on one of these bars, the container would either go forward, or turn left or turn right. The rats could see a plate of food on the other side of the room and tried to get their vehicles to go toward it. The researchers trained the rats for five minutes at a time, and after twenty-four practice sessions, the rats had become proficient at driving. Twenty-four trials were enough to master a task that no rat had likely ever encountered before in the evolutionary history of the species. I think that’s a good demonstration of intelligence.

Now consider the current A.I. programs that are widely acclaimed for their performance. AlphaZero, a program developed by Google’s DeepMind, plays chess better than any human player, but during its training it played forty-four million games, far more than any human can play in a lifetime. For it to master a new game, it will have to undergo a similarly enormous amount of training. By Chollet’s definition, programs like AlphaZero are highly skilled, but they aren’t particularly intelligent, because they aren’t efficient at gaining new skills. It is currently impossible to write a computer program capable of learning even a simple task in only twenty-four trials, if the programmer is not given information about the task beforehand.

Self-driving cars trained on millions of miles of driving can still crash into an overturned trailer truck, because such things are not commonly found in their training data, whereas humans taking their first driving class will know to stop. More than our ability to solve algebraic equations, our ability to cope with unfamiliar situations is a fundamental part of why we consider humans intelligent. Computers will not be able to replace humans until they acquire that type of competence, and that is still a long way off; for the time being, we’re just looking for jobs that can be done with turbocharged auto-complete.

Despite years of hype, the ability of generative A.I. to dramatically increase economic productivity remains theoretical. (Earlier this year, Goldman Sachs released a report titled “Gen AI: Too Much Spend, Too Little Benefit?”) The task that generative A.I. has been most successful at is lowering our expectations, both of the things we read and of ourselves when we write anything for others to read. It is a fundamentally dehumanizing technology because it treats us as less than what we are: creators and apprehenders of meaning. It reduces the amount of intention in the world.

Some individuals have defended large language models by saying that most of what human beings say or write isn’t particularly original. That is true, but it’s also irrelevant. When someone says “I’m sorry” to you, it doesn’t matter that other people have said sorry in the past; it doesn’t matter that “I’m sorry” is a string of text that is statistically unremarkable. If someone is being sincere, their apology is valuable and meaningful, even though apologies have previously been uttered. Likewise, when you tell someone that you’re happy to see them, you are saying something meaningful, even if it lacks novelty.

Something similar holds true for art. Whether you are creating a novel or a painting or a film, you are engaged in an act of communication between you and your audience. What you create doesn’t have to be utterly unlike every prior piece of art in human history to be valuable; the fact that you’re the one who is saying it, the fact that it derives from your unique life experience and arrives at a particular moment in the life of whoever is seeing your work, is what makes it new. We are all products of what has come before us, but it’s by living our lives in interaction with others that we bring meaning into the world. That is something that an auto-complete algorithm can never do, and don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. ♦

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The dairy matrix: its importance, definition, and current application in the context of nutrition and health.

1. From Nutrients to Foods: The Emergence of the Food Matrix

2. dairy foods as examples of food matrices: the dairy matrix, 3. the application of the food matrix and dairy matrix concepts in the literature, 4. definitions of the food and the dairy matrices, 5. implementing the food/dairy matrix concept into nutrition policies and practices, 6. conclusions, author contributions, conflicts of interest.

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Mulet-Cabero, A.-I.; Torres-Gonzalez, M.; Geurts, J.; Rosales, A.; Farhang, B.; Marmonier, C.; Ulleberg, E.K.; Hocking, E.; Neiderer, I.; Gandolfi, I.; et al. The Dairy Matrix: Its Importance, Definition, and Current Application in the Context of Nutrition and Health. Nutrients 2024 , 16 , 2908. https://doi.org/10.3390/nu16172908

Mulet-Cabero A-I, Torres-Gonzalez M, Geurts J, Rosales A, Farhang B, Marmonier C, Ulleberg EK, Hocking E, Neiderer I, Gandolfi I, et al. The Dairy Matrix: Its Importance, Definition, and Current Application in the Context of Nutrition and Health. Nutrients . 2024; 16(17):2908. https://doi.org/10.3390/nu16172908

Mulet-Cabero, Ana-Isabel, Moises Torres-Gonzalez, Jan Geurts, Ashley Rosales, Bita Farhang, Corinne Marmonier, Ellen Kathrine Ulleberg, Erica Hocking, Isabelle Neiderer, Ivana Gandolfi, and et al. 2024. "The Dairy Matrix: Its Importance, Definition, and Current Application in the Context of Nutrition and Health" Nutrients 16, no. 17: 2908. https://doi.org/10.3390/nu16172908

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Thumbs Up: The Story of No-Context Trump

Is he a ghoul or a sociopath.

On the Secret show today, Sarah and I talked about the Harris-Walz interview, more Conservatism Inc. stuff. And also about this Arlington Cemetery business. It’s a banger.

The show is here.

1. Thumbs Up

We go to cemeteries for all sorts of reasons. To pray. To honor the dead. To commune with the souls of the departed. Cemeteries are solemn places. We instinctively whisper when we visit them.

You do not often see people smiling in cemeteries, though that does happen from time to time.

But I have never seen someone give a thumbs-up over a grave. Until now.

My first thought was that this man is a ghoul. Because this wasn’t a one-off slip. He did it twice.

The fellow on the far right with the tight-lipped half-smile and his arms behind his back? That’s Utah Gov. Spencer Cox. Whatever you want to say about his participation in this stunt, at least he’s comporting himself like a normal human being.

He’s not grinning like a salesman while giving a thumbs up over a grave.

Who does that? I really want you to think about this for a minute. Do you know anyone in your life who would pose for a photo in a cemetery giving the thumbs-up?

So the question is: What’s going on inside Trump’s mind here? What makes him do this? I think I have an answer.

What strikes me about these pictures is how banal Trump’s pose and expression are. This is a man who has eagerly put himself forward to be photographed for more than 50 years and long ago settled on a standard move.

That’s one trick famous people use. Another trick is pose-branding. Famous people sometimes adopt a specific pose to reinforce their personal brand. You may remember Miley Cyrus doing this with her tongue out . Well, Trump adopted skank-photographer/abuser Terry Richardson’s thumbs up as his go-to pose. 1

Things only get weird because Trump is pathologically oblivious to context.

Let’s walk through a progression of photos.

Here we have Trump thumbs-upping with Andy Gipson, a low-level pol in Mississippi. Which is a normal thing to do.

And here he is with Boris Johnson, a slightly more important pol.

It’s a little strange to do with a former head of state, but whatever. So far, so good.

Now here Trump is doing the exact same thing with Kyle Rittenhouse. This gets sketchy because Rittenhouse’s celebrity derives entirely from the fact that he killed two people. And in the photo, Rittenhouse seems to know that he’s supposed to do something with his thumb, but he’s not sure what. It’s sad and a little pathetic.

You’ll note that Trump’s pose and facial expression in those three photos are identical. Now here’s another photo of Trump with the same grin and thumbs up.

Trump is the same even though the context is different. You may remember this picture (👆) because it was taken in August of 2019 following a mass shooting in El Paso. Trump was visiting victims of the shooting at the hospital. In this photo, his wife is holding a child who was orphaned by the killer.

Trump is with an orphaned infant, but his pose is the same as when he’s with the wannabe Mississippi politician or the slack-jawed shooter.

And it’s the same pose he pulled this week at Arlington National Cemetery.

Normal people are context-dependent. They behave differently depending on the situation.

That’s because they feel differently in different contexts. Just as a for instance: A normal person would feel differently holding a baby who’d just lost his parents than he would when meeting a celebrity.

But even when a person doesn’t experience feelings that are influenced by context, we understand that society has norms which require us to act differently in different contexts. So, for instance, you might not know anyone who is buried in a given cemetery, but when you walk into the cemetery, you intuitively understand that you should not act like you’re at a ballpark.

For Trump, he is the context.

In Donald Trump’s mind, he is the frame of reference that everything else enters.

Trump isn’t meeting a kid who killed people, that kid is meeting him.

Trump isn’t with an orphan. That baby is part of his photo op.

Trump isn’t standing over a grave. The tombstone is a piece of his campaign for president.

And that’s why, in every one of these pictures, Trump is wearing the exact same smile and giving the exact same thumbs-up. Because to Trump, there is no context but Trump.

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2. You Guys

USA Today has a long piece about Ahmadullah Karimi. You guys saved his life.

Ahmadullah was an Afghan interpreter who helped American soldiers during the war. He worked with—and became friends with—our buddy Will Selber . After the fall of Afghanistan, Ahmadullah and his family were on the run. Selber was doing everything he could to get them to America, and when he put the call out right here in this newsletter, you guys responded. You gave enough money to keep the Karimi family hidden and safe until their visas came through.

Today, the rest of America is hearing Ahmadullah’s story:

Selber, with the help of fellow veterans, found the family safe house to stay hidden. He tapped his veteran community, setting up a GoFundMe campaign to help his former interpreter seeking about $7,000. It drew five times that much within days. Finally, in April he was approved to go.  Selber and other supporters bought him a ticket instead of waiting what can be months for one provided by the government. He even had a U.S. letter stating that he should not be detained.  But Selber knew it could go sideways. He even told Karimi he might have to make a run for it.  On the way to the airport, his son was happy. Karimi tried to hide his nerves while his driver, whose identity he’d confirmed with a code phrase, took routes to avoid police checkpoints. But all the support paid off. Karimi said that with help he got inside and through customs without being challenged or turned away.  Settling into his airplane seat on a flight to Qatar, he buckled his seatbelt and exhaled.  In mid-April, Selber stood inside Boston Logan International Airport, wearing a shirt that read, Operation Enduring Freedom. Soon Karimi walked from the gate with his wife, daughter and their son, who was dressed in jeans and tennis shoes, meeting Selber in what he described as an “unbelievable” moment.  “He did a lot for me and my family,” he said. “He saved my life.” Selber, too, could finally relax after many nerve-wracking months. “I was just like, oh my God, I can finally rest,” he said. Selber drove the family about 180 miles north to Montpelier, Vermont, a town of about 8,000 residents set along the Winooski River, where they would be resettled with the help of refugee agencies and friends. They soon moved into their first apartment. Karimi was delivering food for Door Dash and Uber Eats. By late August, he started a new job as a cashier at a grocery. His son Abdullah was starting school and his wife was learning English and taking her daughter to the park.  “I’m really happy for my wife and my kids. They can go to school. They have freedom here. They have all the rights that a human should have,” he said. 

Read the whole thing. That GoFundMe was you guys. You made this story possible.

If we never do anything else at The Bulwark I’ll view this thing of ours as a success. Because it brought together this community and together you saved these four lives.

Thank you. From the bottom of my heart.

And thank you, Will. For everything you’ve done and everything you will do in the coming years. You, sir, are a great American.

3. A Bad Day

My friend Matt Labash is also a great American. This essay of his will give you a lot of feelings.

On the way back to the house, driving along a road that overlooks our home river — its marshlands teeming with blue heron and bald eagles — we drive around a bend and encounter a middle-aged man with his SUV parked in the middle of the street, his door open. He is frantically shouting into his phone.  He’s wearing what looks like a Scoutmaster uniform — the boyish cap, the woggle-secured neckerchief, the works. I contemplate leaning on my horn to get him to close his door, allowing for easier passage. But he looks so serious about conveying something to whoever he’s talking to, I resist, and just scoot by him. It’s about then I pick up the sight of an older man — possibly in his early seventies — about 30 yards away. His arms are covered in gauzy bandages, with a little blood seeping through. He is stumbling around the middle of the road. And then he teeters off of it, looking as unsteady as a hippo on a tightrope. He face-plants straight into a weedy gulch. I immediately pull over, get out, and wrap my arms around him to help bring him to his feet. “I’m okay, I’m okay,” he insists before I do, looking like a struggling turtle turned over on its carapace — though he is on his stomach, but similarly unable to move, as his limbs spasm to regain uprightness. Alana runs down the road to find out what the Scoutmaster knows — he doesn’t know much, it turns out, but he is now alerting a 911 operator. The second I pull the man up alongside me, I catch an alcohol-infused gale. He smells like a brewery. At first, I think maybe he is having some coronary episode. But I ask him outright, “You’re drunk, right?” He looks at me with a flat stare, as if he’s been caught red-handed and has no alibi. “Yes,” he admits.  While trying to gather whether he’s in any sort of real medical jeopardy  — he insists he’s fine — I ask him if he lives around here.  Yes, he says.  He gives me an address. “I just need to get home,” he pleads. I feel sorry for him. I’ve been there, brother. . . . I go find out what’s what from the Scoutmaster. The latter seems mostly in the dark, too. Scout just happened to find him wandering and bleeding, and bandaged his wounds. He’s trying to get an EMT to pick the guy up. But the guy has insisted to me he doesn’t need any medical treatment, so I call Scout off, and tell him I’ll take him home. Scout wants to make sure: “You’ve got him, then?”  Yes, I assure him. A successful human-misery baton handoff. Alana and I get in the truck, she in the backseat, since my new passenger has already helped himself to shotgun. I ask for his address again. Alana plugs it into her GPS, though he sloppily insists he can get us there without technological assistance. I’m not even sure his address is real.  I ask his name.  He tells me it’s “Roy” (I’ve changed it), and that he’s lived “right up the street for nearly 50 years.” We ride quietly for a while, then I try to make polite conversation. “So, what’s your poison of choice?” I inquire. “Beer,” he slurs. “Why do you ask?”  I pity Roy. It’s a tough road, being a beer drunk. You generally have to drink a lot more beer than you do if you were say, a whiskey fiend, to get the same job done.  Though you not only sustain the same liver damage, but also suffer the additional bloat, even though Roy looks as wiry as a Whippet. I catch my wife’s eyes in the rearview, and she looks at me in a way that says, “WTF? You gonna compare favorite bourbons with the town drunk next?”  But I’m just trying to make him feel at ease, as it has to be embarrassing for him, face-planting on the side of a country road. We ride in silence for another minute or so, when Roy volunteers: “My wife died two years ago. Cancer. It ate her up pretty fast.”

Read the whole thing. Matt’s the best.

I’ll go the full Zoolander here and give Trump credit for originality.

Terry Richardson’s thumbs-up pose is ironic and campy.

Trump’s thumbs-up pose is post-camp: Yes, it’s fake. But Trump is pretending that it’s sincere.

Look at photos of Trump with his normie fans and you often see the difference between his expression and the expression of people who are imitating him with utter sincerity because they’re not in on the joke.

Those are some of the saddest pictures.

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The unconventional philosophy behind “founder mode”

• Main Story: Investor Paul Graham published a provocative essay on the approach to delegation by founders who are trying to grow their business.
• Graham challenges the prevailing management culture of hiring “professional fakers” and makes the case for Steve Jobs-esque “founder mode.”
• Also among this week’s stories: Why a high degree of company “vitality” matters in the long run, AI chip challengers, and economist Eugene Fama.

A few days ago, the investor Paul Graham published an essay with a provocative central insight: when it comes to growing a business, the conventional wisdom is almost always wrong.

Instead of shifting to “manager mode” as a company expands — i.e. delegating tasks to subordinates — the most successful startup CEOs will continue to stay in “founder mode” forever.

“Hire good people and give them room to do their jobs,” Paul writes. “Sounds great when it’s described that way, doesn’t it? Except in practice, judging from the report of founder after founder, what this often turns out to mean is: hire professional fakers and let them drive the company into the ground.” He adds:

Key quote: “Whatever founder mode consists of, it’s pretty clear that it’s going to break the principle that the CEO should engage with the company only via his or her direct reports. ‘Skip-level’ meetings will become the norm instead of a practice so unusual that there’s a name for it. And once you abandon that constraint there are a huge number of permutations to choose from. For example, Steve Jobs used to run an annual retreat for what he considered the 100 most important people at Apple, and these were not the 100 people highest on the org chart. Can you imagine the force of will it would take to do this at the average company? And yet imagine how useful such a thing could be. It could make a big company feel like a startup.”

One factor that separates good investments from great ones

Harrison Moot, an investor at TDM Growth Partners, suggests in a recent memo that there is one key factor — often overlooked — that can predict a company’s long-term outperformance: its vi tality .

This trait — defined as a firm’s ability to successfully expand their total addressable market — won’t appear on an income statement or a balance sheet. Nor is it something that can be easily modeled into Excel. But in practice, Harrison writes, a high degree of vitality can lead to long-term exceptional outcomes for a handful of select companies.

“Vitality is only one of several factors in our assessment of a company’s growth prospects, but more than any other it separates the good investments from the great, multi-decade compounders,” he writes. “Our experience has shown that Vitality is often the key driver of long-duration growth and that growth is the primary driver of superior long-term investment returns.”

Key quote: “The nagging fear that all investors, particularly growth investors, are afraid of is a company ‘hitting the wall.’ A sudden deceleration in growth, not always explainable and often unexpected by both investors and management teams, typically resulting in a painful re-rate downwards… This is why Vitality, a company’s ability to successfully expand their total addressable market (‘TAM’) over time by developing new products and/or services, is so important. It extends the TAM and thus the potential for higher sustained growth.”

A few more links I enjoyed:

The AI chip startup that could take down Nvidia – via Freethink

Key quote: “In 2022, Etched’s co-founders decided to put all their chips on transformers (so to speak), betting that they would be important enough to the future of AI that a microchip optimized to run only transformer-based models would be incredibly valuable. ‘There aren’t that many people that are connected enough to AI companies to realize the opportunity and also crazy enough to take the bet — that’s where a couple 22-year-olds can come in and give it a swing,’ Etched co-founder Robert Wachen told Freethink.”

Large Positions – Ian Cassel

Key quote: “‍We normally hold 4-8 core positions (85% of portfolio) and another 4-5 smaller/tracking positions. I view our large core positions similar to veteran players on a sports team. Core positions have earned their right to their position size/salary. You’ve spent considerable time to get to know them. You’ve witnessed how the management and the business react under pressure. They’ve proven themselves and have earned your conviction and trust. The stock has rewarded you with good returns and you have rewarded the management/business with a bigger weighting in the portfolio.”

Economist Eugene Fama: ‘Efficient markets is a hypothesis. It’s not reality’ – via The Financial Times

Key quote: “Fama is arguably the world’s most famous and influential finance professor, thanks to his revolutionary efficient market hypothesis — that stock market prices at any time incorporate all available information, thanks to the cumulative and unending efforts of millions of investors constantly trying to outfox it. The paradox is that as a result of their efforts, the stock market is in practice almost impossible to beat.”

Brain Scientists Finally Discover the Glue that Makes Memories Stick for a Lifetime – via Scientific American

Key quote: “The persistence of memory is crucial to our sense of identity, and without it, there would be no learning, for us or any other animal. It’s little wonder, then, that some researchers have called how the brain stores memories the most fundamental question in neuroscience.”

From the archives:

What Is Strategy? – via Michael Porter (1996)

Key quote: “The root of the problem is the failure to distinguish between operational effectiveness and strategy. The quest for productivity, quality, and speed has spawned a remarkable number of management tools and techniques: total quality management, benchmarking, time-based competition, outsourcing, partnering, reengineering, change management. Although the resulting operational improvements have often been dramatic, many companies have been frustrated by their inability to translate those gains into sustainable profitability. And bit by bit, almost imperceptibly, management tools have taken the place of strategy. As managers push to improve on all fronts, they move farther away from viable competitive positions.”

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