Which question can help a reader discover the author's point?
What information does the author want the reader to learn?
What definitions, facts, or examples support this idea?
How does this information help the reader understand the reason?
What inferences can the reader make to connect ideas?
Answers
The author’s purpose is the reason they decided to write about something in the first place.
There are many reasons a writer puts pen to paper. It’s important that our students possess the necessary tools for identifying these various reasons and intents.
Being able to identify the author’s purpose accurately is absolutely essential if the student is to effectively evaluate a piece of writing.
WHAT ARE THE DIFFERENT TYPES OF AUTHOR’S PURPOSE?
Depending who you talk to, when the question is raised about how many types of author’s purpose there are, you’ll generally be quoted a number ranging from around 3 to about 7.
A good starting point for students beginning to learn more about the different types of author’s purpose is to begin with the main 3: to persuade, to inform, and to entertain. These can easily be remembered with the PIE acronym.
However, these 3 represent only an introduction. In the interests of covering the topic a little more comprehensively, we will define 5 different types of author’s purpose, look at some examples of each in use, and give a few pointers helpful in identifying them.
AUTHOR’S PURPOSE DEFINITION
The author’s purpose is their intent (or purpose) for writing something. To either persuade, inform or entertain an audience.
You will most commonly see these three aspects attributed as being the author’s purpose however other elements such as describing and explaining are commonly sighted as well.
We will explore the author’s purpose in much more detail throughout this article.