FAQs

Author Purposes worksheet

Task 6 Author’s Purpose

            Bias involves a scenario where an author or a speaker uses certain facts, choices of words, and the tone and quality of description to convey a certain feeling or attitude. In a text, its purpose is to convey a certain point of view or attitude towards a subject (Marttunen et al., 2021). Bias is different from an author’s purpose. To teach or inform the reader, the author uses expository writing.

The purpose of an author is reflected in the way he writes about a topic or an area of research. For instance, if the purpose of the author is to amuse, they will use anecdotes or jokes in the writing (Palmatier et al., 2018). Clues to determine the purpose are found in prefaces, titles, and the author’s background. Accordingly, a piece of work can have a purpose in that it informs readers of the direction of the text, but only uses certain skewed facts and choices of words. In this case, such a text can misinform the reader without detection.            Typically, an author has one purpose in a piece of work although there are four main purposes in a lesson. Having read all the eight paragraphs in the “Author’s Purpose Worksheet”, one answer that best describes an author’s purpose in writing is to inform or teach the reader. Here, the author takes an expository approach (Marcelin et al., 2019). From the eight paragraphs, the first one best describes the author’s purpose of informing or teaching the reader, for example, about strip mining, and how it is carried out. The author took an expository approach whereby the reader is taken through the process of terracide or strip mining.