Characteristics of the Two Contexts

The Readership Context
The readership context is determined by the following factors:

• Geographical - Nation, culture, language, physical community.
• Social - Interests, pastimes.
• Educational - Level of education, subjects studied.
• Professional - Area of professionalism, career history.

These contexts overlap and interpretation is different depending on where the person is located.

The Authorial Context
The author adds a different dimension to the piece of writing or message composed - intention. There are two states of intention that are assumed:

• Message intended to convey information
  The author produces for a particular reason. It is usually ascribed that text is:

  "is a collection of signs purposefully structured by a sender with the intention of changing the image-structure of a recipient."

  Madden puts it succintly by saying:

  "the closer an author's context is to that of a reader, the greater is the chance that the author's work will be informative. In exceptional circumstances, an author may choose to convey more than one message in a given text."

• Message not intended to convey information
  Sometimes the author leaves the reader to derive their own meaning from a piece of information. Readers however need to be information literate to fully benefit from the information accessed. More so they need to have access to different sources to compare similar pieces of information before arriving at a decision or before storing that information in their heads to build their knowlege base about someting.

Basic Information Concepts