

This involves the use of arguments, logic, evidence, and emotional appeals. In persuasive texts, the author’s main purpose is to convince the reader to accept a particular point of view or to take a specific action.

To PersuadeĬommon Text Genres: Advertisements, Speeches, Opinion columns, Cover letters, Product reviews Rowling’s “Harry Potter” series, which was written with the primary goal of entertaining readers with its magical world and captivating story. The author may also create characters, plot, and settings to keep the reader engaged and entertained, as with novels.Ī well-known example is J.K. To do this, the writing might be humorous, suspenseful, mysterious, or touching, depending on the genre. Here, the content needs to be delivered in a way that doesn’t bore and keeps the reader compelled to keep reading. This type of writing is meant to captivate the reader’s imagination and provide enjoyment. To EntertainĬommon Text Genres: Novels, Short stories, Poetry, Plays, Comics This is also often the purpose of non-fiction books, academic writing, scientific articles, and of course, this very website you’re reading right now.Ī National Geographic article on climate change informs readers about the state of the planet, providing facts and figures about global warming, melting ice caps, and so on.

It is common, for example, in news articles, where journalists must adhere to journalistic ethics and ensure the information is entirely factual. Texts designed to inform tend to seek an objective stance, where the author presents facts, data, or truths to the reader with the sole intention of educating or delivering important information to the reader. To InformĬommon Text Genres: News articles, Research papers, Textbooks, Biographies, Manuals. For example, persuasive texts should cite sources, while in reflective texts, we should expect first-person language and more intimate language.īelow are a range of possible purposes that authors may have when writing texts.Ĭonclusion Author’s Purpose Examples 1. Understand Genre Convention: If we know the author’s purpose, we can predict and develop expectations about how the piece will be written.If an author’s job is to inform, we can read the text closely in order to examine its logic but if the purpose is to entertain, we can consume the text with less of a critical lens. Determining Meaning: We might also want to know the author’s purpose in order to infer and predict what the underlying message might be.When reading an article online, for example, we want to figure out what the author’s purpose is in order to determine whether they’re going to write with a particular political bias. Media Literacy: We want to make sure we’re not tricked by the author.It s important to know the author’s purpose for a range of reasons, including: The author’s purpose of a text refers to why they wrote the text.
