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Every text is created for a reason, and identifying and evaluating this purpose is fundamental to textual analysis.
Every text is created for a reason, and identifying and evaluating this purpose is fundamental to textual analysis.
Purpose: (intent, goal) - the reason a creator composes a text for an audience.
Introduction
Introduction
Critical to our English studies is a desire to understand why people create the things they do.
While these reasons are vast and varied, almost all texts are created with one or more of the following broad purposes in mind: to entertain, to inform or to persuade.
YouTube
YouTube
To reflect upon ways that texts attempt to entertain, inform or persuade audiences, consider the video sharing platform YouTube.
Are there any YouTube channels that you follow because you find their videos entertaining? Such creators hope to make us smile, laugh and otherwise enjoy our experience of watching a video so that we will continue to enjoy content produced by their channel.
Think now of channels which upload informative videos. Hopefully you enjoy such videos in your own time, but perhaps they are most watched in the classroom, or in preparation for assessment tasks. The creators of these videos do their best to present complex ideas in simple and straightforward ways.
Finally, can you think of channels which create persuasive videos? Such videos use the power of rhetoric to try and convince audiences to adopt a particular point of view. Such videos (and creators) can be controversial, but they can also help audiences to see issues from new and important perspectives.
Understanding Purpose
Understanding Purpose
While these labels are helpful, most of the texts we study in English do not fall neatly into these specific categories.
This is because skilled creators often try to appeal to audiences in different ways to achieve their purposes. After all, if a persuasive text is in no way entertaining, will people be inclined to talk about it or share it? While if a text is purely entertaining, will some audiences simply dismiss it as a waste of time?
When studying texts in English, we should always ask ourselves, "Why was this created?" Once we identify a creator's broad purpose, we can start to hone in on the specific reasons they made a particular text for a particular audience.
Editor's Notes
Editor's Notes
I remember a Year 9 English class in which we were studying the poem The Road Not Taken by Robert Frost.
As usual with such poems, there were plenty of blank looks around the room when we finished reading it out loud for the first time. So, we went back through the poem, carefully picking out some of the techniques and trying to figure out what Frost's speaker was getting at (something about picking a direction?).
Eventually, we were more-or-less in agreement regarding what the poem was about (something to do with the way we exaggerate the importance of small decisions when we look back on them). Still, there remained some sceptical looks around the room, until one student had the courage to ask, "Sir, did he really mean all that?"
This is a fair question, because we are sometimes tempted to come up with overly complex interpretations of texts to prove our worth in the classroom.
While this is understandable, it is important to remember that any interpretation of a text is only as good as the logic and evidence behind it. If we think we've figured out the purpose of a text, we'd best be able to support our position with clear reasoning and compelling examples.
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