Determine the type of audience for your work and write accordingly. Your audience will determine the tone you use; a younger audience will merit a more casual tone, whereas an academic paper will merit a more serious, studious tone. Come up with a thesis for your paper and make sure you have the appropriate sources to support your argument.
Determine length and write accordingly. Length can be very important as to how to develop context for your essay. If the essay is shorter in length, it should only take one or two paragraphs to set up context for the rest of your essay; for a paper with a 10-page or more requirement, it may take 1 or 2 pages to set up context. Use more research for a longer paper to create deeper context.
Introduce the topic in your essay. Establish context before going into the thesis. For example, in an essay about how H.P. Lovecraft uses New England imagery and lifestyles to write the American Gothic story, write about Lovecraft's relationship to New England:
"In most of Howard Philip Lovecraft's work is an emphatic fixation on the New England region. Lovecraft resided in Providence, Rhode Island for most of his life, and even while he stayed in the ever-stimulating and culturally dense New York City for a few years, he eventually came to loathe it and drifted back to his homeland. The place of his birth undoubtedly had a profound effect on his personal identity and world views, and served as a significant counterpart to his stories, which were then classified as 'weird fiction.'"
Continue to orient readers to the context by using examples to support your thesis. Therefore, in the Lovecraft essay, make a point in your argument and back it up with one or more examples. In this example, the argument is Lovecraft's habit of contrasting New England life to the modern world; use an example that supports this point --- in this case, Lovecraft's story "The Dunwich Horror" --- and set up the story's context:
"The contrast between the New England community and the developing 'modern' world outside its borders can also be applied to Lovecraft's "The Dunwich Horror." The contrast is clearly set between the timid townsfolk of the small, decaying Dunwich, who "are never anxious to call the outside world's attention to themselves," (Lovecraft, 107), and Wilbur Whateley, the strange outcast youth born in Dunwich. Wilbur evokes an unsettling sentiment among the locals because of his unusually quick growth spurts ("[Wilbur] had commenced to talk ... at the age of eleven months," (Lovecraft, 104)), but also his unusually large intellectual capacity unnatural in a Dunwich citizen, as well as rumors of him participating in cult-like animal sacrifices to an unknown entity."