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Author’s Purpose and Position

Learn about the different purposes of texts, the author's position, and how they work together. Improve your reading comprehension skills.

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Author’s Purpose and Position

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  1. Author’s Purpose and Position

  2. What are our learning goals? • To understand and identify the different purposes of texts. • To review the distinction between non-fiction and fiction. • To understand how the author’s position affects the text.

  3. What is author’s purpose? • Did you know that everything you read has a purpose? • When an author writes something (book, magazine, textbook, newspaper article), he/she chooses his/her words for a purpose.

  4. What is the purpose? • The author’s purpose is the main reason that he/she has for writing the selection. • The author’s purpose will be to: • Entertain • Explain/Inform • Argue/Persuade • Describe E.g., Edgar Allan Poe, the “father of the detective story” wrote with the purpose of entertaining.

  5. What is the author’s position? • When an author writes to persuade (or sometimes even to entertain or inform) he/she will have his/her own position on the subject. • The author’s position is an author’s opinion about the subject. Lewis Carroll’s Self Photo

  6. How do the author’s purpose & author’s position go together? • Author’s purpose and position go together. • The author will want you to see the topic from his/her point of view or through his/her eyes. This is the author’s position. • For some issues, you will be able to tell if the author is FOR or AGAINST something. Famous writer/director M. Night Shyamalan

  7. I know the purpose! • When you are able to recognize the author’s purpose, you will have a better understanding of the selection. • Also, the purpose will determine how you read a selection.

  8. Can a selection have two purposes? • Some selections will have two purposes. • For example, if the article is about eating healthy, it will try to persuade you to eat your vegetables as well as, inform you about the different types of food groups.

  9. Author’s Purpose: Discuss/Inform • If the author’s purpose is to discuss/inform, you will learn something from the selection. • Information pieces sometime use one or more of the following: • Facts • Details/Instructions • Places • Events • People

  10. Author’s Purpose: Argue/Persuade • If the author’s purpose is to Argue/persuade, the author will want you to believe his/her position. • Persuasive pieces are usually non-fiction, biased, and based on opinion. • Although there may be facts, it contains the author’s opinions. • With persuasive pieces, the author’s will make his/her position clear (whether he/she is FOR or AGAINST it).

  11. Author’s Purpose: Entertain • If the author’s purpose is to entertain, one goal may be to tell a story or to describe characters, places or events (real or imaginary). • Examples of entertaining texts include: scripts, poems, stories, jokes, or even comic strips.

  12. Author’s Purpose: Describe • Paints a picture in the reader’s mind often making use of sensory details (what the writer hears, sees, smells, feels, etc) • Often to describe an object, process, or place. • Ex: Menus, catalogs, travel brochures, some poetry, technical manuals, etc.

  13. Author’s Purpose Quiz • Read the following passages and answer the questions that follow. Example: What is Lewis Carroll’s purpose by writing the novel Through the Looking-Glass? Well, duh - to entertain! All fiction is written for that purpose!

  14. Determine the author’s purpose • Use the information on the bottle to determine the author’s purpose. • A. To Inform • B. To Entertain • C. To Persuade

  15. Can you identify the author’s purpose? • The correct answer is A, to inform. • The label contained information and instructions on how to use the medicine.

  16. Can you Identify the Authors Purpose? • The word is terracide. It is not committed with guns and knives, but with relentless bulldozers, roaring dump trucks, and giant shovels like mythological beasts. Dynamite cuts and rips apart mountains to reach the minerals inside, leaving nothing but empty, naked hills. The land is left wasted and allowed to slide down upon houses and into streams, making the land unlivable and the stream water undrinkable. This is terracide, or if you prefer, strip mining.

  17. Can you identify the author’spurpose? Inform Entertain Persuade • “His face appeared in the window. She knew he had been the cause of her waking at 3 a.m. Was she seeing things? Was his face real? She tried to lie still and decide what to do. Just then, the window shattered. She flew across the room to the hallway and straight into her mother’s room.”

  18. Can you identify the author’s purpose? • The correct answer is to entertain. • The author tried to capture a suspenseful mood in the story. • The story is probably fiction. Well … maybe.

  19. Can you identify the author’s purpose? • “It is recommended that parents read to their children everyday, starting as early as six months of age. When you read with your children, you are starting them off in life as a life-long reader and learner. It is never too late to pick up a book and read; people in their eighties have learned how to read and discovered the pleasure of reading. Turn off the television and read a book!”

  20. You can tell the author wrote this passage to • A. Inform • B. Entertain • C. Persuade

  21. Can you identify the author’s purpose? • The correct answer is C, to persuade. • This is an emotional appeal to do the right thing: READ! • Also, the last sentence tells you encourages you to do something: “Turn off the television”

  22. Identify the Author’s Purpose “Film writer and director M. Night Shyamalan gained international recognition when he wrote and directed 1999's The Sixth Sensewhich was nominated for six Academy Awards including Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Original Screenplay. (That’s the award for script writing!) His 2002 film Signs, in which he also acted, gained bothcritical and financial success.”

  23. The author’s purpose was to • A. Inform • B. Entertain • C. Persuade … to inform the reader about M. Night’s filmography.

  24. What are the steps to determining the author’s purpose and author’s position? • Read the selection carefully. • Determine if the selection is fiction or nonfiction.

  25. What is Fiction again? • A fiction piece is from the author’s imagination and is not based on facts. • Fiction pieces can be novels, short stories, scripts, etc. • The purpose of fiction is to entertain the reader.

  26. What is Non-fiction? • Non-fiction pieces are based on facts and author’s opinions about a subject. • Non-fiction pieces could be biographies, articles from textbooks, newspaper and magazine articles. • The purpose of non-fiction writing is to inform and sometimes to persuade.

  27. What was the purpose of this PowerPoint review? • To persuade? • To entertain? • To inform? To inform! (And to entertain just a little.)

  28. Not Really “the End” … Mwahahaha Hopefully you have been informed by this review and found yourself somewhat entertained as well…not to mention persuaded to look deep to find just what the author is trying to do.

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