ABSTRACT
In Chapter 2 we set out what we see as key aspects of the broader socio-political context in which any act of writing takes place. Drawing mainly on insights from social theory, we showed how writing, and the right to write, is tightly woven into the fabric of socio-political action and the shaping of ideologies and social structures. In this chapter we focus more closely on the immediate social context for specific acts of writing. Drawing on linguistics theory, literacy studies and composition studies, we examine different ways of conceptualising ‘context’, and how these relate to claims about the ‘autonomy’ of writing. We show how both the act of writing and the linguistic realisations of texts themselves are shaped by the context in which they are embedded.
