KEY ESSAY WRITING SKILLS
Embedding and contextualising evidence (part 1)
why context matters and how to figure it out
This guide is part 1 of a 2-part series on embedding and contextualising evidence. This guide will first discuss what the evidence part of a PEA paragraph means, before explaining what ‘context’ is, why it’s so important for your evidence, and how you should go about figuring out what context to include. The next guide will show you how to bring your quotations and context together into evidence sentences. There is a quiz at the end of the second guide which you can use to test yourself.
Contents of this guide
Part 2 will explain in more detail how to actually embed quotations, and will provide a final summary based on the two guides in the series.
Quick links for this skill
Other guides in the series:
The difference between evidence, quotation and context
People sometimes think that the evidence part of a PEA paragraph means a quotation. This isn’t quite true.
First, you don’t always need to include a quotation in your evidence. More often than not, you will, but, especially at GCSE, you may want to write an evidence sentence that doesn’t include a quotation. You may not remember a quotation from that point in the text, or it might be better to do it without quotation if you want to summarise the meaning of several different episodes in the text that, when taken together, all show a particular thing. This is perfectly fine! You will almost certainly want to do this from time to time in your essays, especially at GCSE. You will still need to put those moments into context (as discussed in the rest of this guide) in order to make your reference precise, but you just won’t need to embed an actual quotation. We discuss this in a bit more detail, with examples, in the guide to choosing evidence.
More often than not, though, you will include a quotation, especially if you want to analyse the writer’s use of language, form and structure. And if you do, then the evidence part of a PEA paragraph is made up of two separate things:
The quotation(s) that you want to analyse
The context for that quotation(s)
Part 1 of this 2-part guide is focussed on the second of these two components: context.
Context is the part which helps to make both quotations and precise references make sense. It also helps to keep your quotations short, by allowing you to only quote the key words which you want to analyse, which is really helpful for GCSE when you will have to memorise lots of quotations.
Why you need to put quotations into context
Let’s start with why context is so important. It is an essential part of your evidence because the context of a quotation can make a huge difference to what it means. Consider the following example:
Some very simple analysis of evidence without context: In the article, the writer uses the phrase “technology is killing us,” which suggests that she doesn’t like technology and thinks that it is causing people harm.
Here, we have a quotation, but it’s not put into context (e.g. we don’t know exactly how it’s used in the text). After that we have an inference based on the quotation. Now, at first, this inference seems perfectly reasonable based on the quotation: it does sound as if the writer doesn’t like technology very much (it’s “killing us”). However, the quotation is not in context, so it’s impossible to be sure exactly what it means. When does the writer use that phrase? Is that the whole sentence or are there other words which might affect the way we interpret it? We need to know this in order to work out if the inference is valid.
What the article actually says: The news I hate the most is the news about how technology is killing us.
When we see the quotation in context, we can see that the inference above is not valid: the writer does not dislike technology or think it’s harming us. What she dislikes is news about this. She seems, in fact, to be saying the opposite of what the analysis says. This is why context is so important. Here are some more simple examples of this:
Out of context quotation: “I hate Peter”
Actual quotation: “I hate Peter when he’s like this.”
The context for this quotation shows that it’s very much about Peter being difficult or irritating, at times, and not about someone hating him.
Out of context quotation: “she loved Peter”
Actual quotation: “She had always longed to get to the point where she could say she loved Peter, her son, but she never could; she didn’t know what was wrong with her.”
This more extreme example shows just how big a difference context can make to a quotation.
It’s not just quotations that need to be put into context in your evidence. All references to the text need to be contextualised:
Out of context reference to the text (without quotation): Peter dumps his girlfriend.
What actually happens in the text: Peter has a massive crisis of faith because he thinks his girlfriend is better than him, and so he dumps her before she has the chance to dump him.
Here the context of Peter’s action makes a big difference to the inferences we might make from it, as well as to the big ideas the writer is communicating through this action. It’s not just quotations that need context: all references to the text need to be put into context if you want to analyse them properly.
The important thing here is not that, without including context in your evidence, you will misinterpret the texts that you analyse. This may not be the case. The reason you need context in your evidence is to make your argument clear. Without context, the person reading your analysis can’t tell whether your inferences are good (like you want them to be) or bad (like the example above, about technology), and so they won’t know whether to agree with your argument or not. This prevents your argument from being convincing, which is the most important thing with essay writing. That’s the main reason why you need to put your evidence in context - to make your overall argument convincing.
The other really handy thing about context is that it allows you to explain what else is going on in the text around your quotation. It allows you to show that you understand more of the plot and the characters than just what happens in the quotation. The context part of the evidence sentence will allow you to summarise what’s going on in the text at the point at which the quotation occurs. This is essential for getting the higher marks for understanding a text (AO1 at GCSE). This is important for all Literature essays, but it’s perhaps most important for essays about poetry, which you’ll need to write a lot of at GCSE. You can use the context part of the evidence to summarise the different parts of the poem to show you’ve understood it.
How to work out the context for a quotation
So, how do you know what context to include? Where does the context begin and end? There have to be some limits here. You can’t provide all possible context for a quotation without, essentially, retelling the entire story, which would be ridiculous. Exactly how much context you need to include will depend on the quotation you want to use, but there are some rules of thumb that can guide you:
You’re going to need to consider at least all of the other words in the sentence that the quotation comes from.
You might need to consider the sentences around it too.
If you’re analysing a narrative text (a story, a play or a poem), you need to factor in what’s going on in the story at this point: has something just happened to the character that we need to know about to understand the quotation? If they’ve just been dumped, for example, then the fact they’re miserable means something different to if they’ve just got their GCSE results.
There are no precise rules – this is not an exact science – but you should try to ensure that your evidence makes sense to someone who hasn’t read the text you’re writing about. Or at least someone who doesn’t know exactly which bit you’re quoting from.
As such, you should consider these two questions:
When does it happen?
What’s going on in the text at the time?
If you answer those questions in the context, then you should be alright.
Examples of evidence in context - both quotations and references
The last part of this guide is just a series of short examples to give you a sense of what context means in terms of quotations and other references. The next guide in this series will look in more detail about how to embed quotations into context-setting sentences.
At the start of the article, the writer claims that, more than any other kind of news, she hates news about how “technology is killing us.”
When she notices the laundry that her mother “had hung up but not lived to take down,” Comity is overcome by grief, causing her to “wail” and “scream” and “sob” on the veranda.
In part 1, chapter 3, Gardo and Raphael are discussing what to do with the bag; Gardo tells Raphael that they “can’t leave it here,” and Raphael agrees, before immediately asking Gardo, “Where to?”
In Act 1 Scene 3, Sol’s mum gets angry at Sol’s dad for being out drinking and Sol is described in the stage directions as “defending his dad”, before arguing that he “probably just went for one drink.”
In Chapter 10, when the pigs first enter the yard on two legs, Napoleon comes in “majestically upright.”
The writer finishes his initial description of the world of mini beauty pageants by noting that the contestants “wear false eyelashes and can be as young as five.”
When Gerald gets out the engagement ring for Sheila during the exposition in Act 1, she asks if it's the one he wanted her to have.
In the opening scenes of Act 3, Macbeth is a totally changed man, plotting to murder his best friend, manipulating the feeble murderers into do his bidding by questioning their manhood and keeping all of his diabolical plans a secret from his wife.