This page is brought to you by the OWL at Purdue University. When printing this page, you must include the entire legal notice.
Copyright ©1995-2018 by The Writing Lab & The OWL at Purdue and Purdue University. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, reproduced, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed without permission. Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our terms and conditions of fair use.
Summary:
This presentation is designed to introduce your students to a variety of factors that contribute to strong, well-organized writing. This presentation is suitable for the beginning of a composition course or the assignment of a writing project in any class.
Authors and audiences both have a wide range of purposes for communicating. The importance of purpose in rhetorical situations cannot be overstated. It is the varied purposes of a rhetorical situation that determine how an author communicates a text and how audiences receive a text. Rhetorical situations rarely have only one purpose. Authors and audiences tend to bring their own purposes (and often multiple purposes each) to a rhetorical situation, and these purposes may conflict or complement each other depending on the efforts of both authors and audiences.
Authors’ purposes
In the textbook Writing Today, Johnson-Sheehan and Paine discuss purpose more specifically in terms of the author of a text. They suggest that most texts written in college or in the workplace often fill one of two broader purposes: to be informative or to be persuasive. Under each of these two broad purposes, they identify a host of more specific purposes. The following table is not exhaustive; authors could easily have purposes that are not listed on this table.
Table: Author Purposes
Informative
Persuasive
to inform
to persuade
to describe
to convince
to define
to influence
to review
to argue
to notify
to recommend
to instruct
to change
to advise
to advocate
to announce
to urge
to explain
to defend
to demonstrate
to justify
to illustrate
to support
(Johnson-Sheehan & Paine 17)
Audiences’ purposes
Authors’ purposes tend to be almost exclusive active if only because authors conscientiously create texts for specific audiences. But audiences’ purposes may range from more passive purpose to more active purposes.
Table: Audience Purposes
More Passive Purposes
More Active Purposes
to receive notice
to examine
to feel reassured
to quantify
to feel a sense of unity
to assess
to be entertained
to make informed decisions
to receive instruction
to interpret
to enjoy
to evaluate
to hear advice
to judge
to be inspired
to resist change
to review
to criticize
to understand
to ridicule
to learn
to disprove
The Role of Purposes
Authors’ and audiences’ purposes in communicating determine the basic rationale behind other decisions both authors and audiences make (such as what to write or speak about, or whom to listen to, or what medium to use, or what setting to read in, among others). An author’s purpose in communicating could be to instruct, persuade, inform, entertain, educate, startle, excite, sadden, enlighten, punish, console, or many, many others. Like authors, audiences have varied purposes for reading, listening to, or otherwise appreciating pieces of communication. Audiences may seek to be instructed, persuaded, informed, entertained, educated, startled, excited, saddened, enlightened, punished, consoled, or many, many others. Authors’ and audiences’ purposes are only limited to what authors and audiences want to accomplish in their moments of communication. There are as many purposes for communicating as there are words to describe those purposes.
Attitude
Attitude is related to purpose and is a much-overlooked element of rhetorical situations. But attitude affects a great deal of how a rhetorical situation unfolds. Consider if an author communicates with a flippant attitude as opposed to a serious attitude, or with drama as opposed to comedy, or calmly as opposed to excitedly. Depending on authors’ purposes, audiences’ specific qualities, the nature of the context, and other factors, any of these attitudes could either help or hinder authors in their efforts to communicate depending on the other factors in any given rhetorical situation. Like authors, audiences bring diverse attitudes to how they appreciate different pieces of communication. The audience’s attitude while reading, listening, observing, or whatnot affects how they receive and process the communication they receive.
Author's PurposeWhen authors write a text, they have in mind a specific purpose, or what they want to achieve in the text. This is known as the author’s purpose. Authors write texts for many different purposes.These are common types of author’s purposes:
Instruct: includes steps in a process and directions
Entertain: uses humor, narration, tells a story, etc.
Inform: includes mainly facts and information
Persuade: tries to get the reader to believe, think, feel, or do something
Describe: uses details and description