Purpose+of+Text

It is worrisome that kids can't figure out what an author is trying to do in a piece of writing. This is not merely academic. Students should know when they are being persuaded or sold an idea as well as have some idea of how the author is attempting to achieve that purpose. Students should be able to discern if the author is merely trying to inform them about a topic or trying to make them walk away with a particular bias. Students should understand when something is created for entertainment and how that is different that something created to persuade or inform.

Most kids can identify the basics that they learned in middle school, such as persuade, inform, and entertain. However, many times they have a hard time articulating what the author is trying to convince them to believe or what the main idea of the informational piece is.

The [|site here]has a brief explanation of the basic purposes as well as the typical point of view and tone one would find in a work with each purpose.

This is one of those skills that requires practice paired with some ideas from the main idea or summarizing section. The idea would be that students that can't identify the author's purpose are not processing what they are reading properly. Many times students who struggle with reading make assumptions or predictions about what they are about to read (which is good), but the turn out to be wrong and the students fail to correct their own assumptions (which is bad). This leads many of them to not be able to think clearly about why they read what they just did or what the author wanted them to get out of it.