Intent–Context Communication: Front-Loading Why and Where Alongside What

Guidance on interpersonal communication has largely converged on clarity: state the message plainly, adapt it to the audience, and confirm receipt ("effective communication"). This paper argues that a distinct and common failure mode survives that advice — the sender transmits content while leaving intent (why the message is being sent and the effect it is meant to have) and context (the situational frame that produced it) unstated. Receivers then infer intent and context from their own priors, a process that is systematically biased toward uncharitable readings, particularly in text, in low-trust relationships, and across group boundaries. I define intent–context communication (ICC) as the deliberate, front-loaded disclosure of declared intent and declared context alongside propositional content, distinguish it from adjacent constructs (politeness, justification, over-explanation), and locate it relative to established work in pragmatics (the cooperative principle, speech-act theory, relevance theory, common ground) and social psychology (correspondence bias, hostile attribution, egocentrism in computer-mediated communication). I offer six testable propositions and a vignette-experiment design to evaluate the central claim: that explicit intent and context reduce divergence in how receivers interpret a sender's motive and lower hostile attribution.