Purpose in writing
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The document discusses how to identify the underlying purpose or "why" behind a piece of writing. It explains that examining the author's choice of emotive language, tone, sentence structure, voice, clue words, references, and intended effect on the reader can help reveal whether the purpose is to be informative, persuasive, didactic, or create identification with the reader. The overall tone suggests the document aims to provide a framework for analyzing the purpose behind a text.
Purpose in writing
- 1. How to identify the “why” behind the words
- 2. If asked to comment on the purpose of a piece of writing, there are certain elements one needs to examine:
- 3. has the author used emotive terms for the topic being discussed, such as referring to a trend as a "plague", an accident as a "tragedy", or a political movement as "a crusade"? This is to provoke an emotive as well as an intellectual response.
- 4. Is the author simply being informative, or is the tone more conversational? Is the reader being directly addressed? This can have the effect of winning the confidence of the reader, which will suggest that the purpose of the piece is to be persuasive.
- 5. Long sentences, short sentences? Use of Active Voice for didactic purposes, or Passive Voice, to remove the sense of agency from writing? Has a particular authorial voice been used to create a close sense of identification with the reader, or is a more cold impersonal tone cultivated?
- 6. Which clue words (given in the link below) have been used, showing us the author’s purpose in producing the piece of writing?
- 7. If the author has directly referenced other works, why have these been chosen? Alternatively, if the style or subject matter of well-known works have been emulated, why were these particular ones chosen?
- 8. This is possibly the simplest way of determining the purpose of a text: what effect did it have on you? Did you laugh, or cry, or feel filled with patriotic fervour? Chances are that this was intentional, and thus demonstrates the author’s purpose. If it left you cold, was this a failing of the writing, or did it run contrary to your own interests and opinions?