8 What are the Purposes for Reading and Writing?

Purpose

Throughout this course handbook, you will find references to the rhetorical situation. This is a frame that directs all aspects of the things we read and write. To briefly summarize, the rhetorical situation consists of:

• Topic
• Writer
• Audience
• Purpose

The most important part of a text is the purpose. There are many purposes for reading and writing, but the three main categories are

• informing,
• persuading, and
• entertaining.

In college and in most work environments, the overall purpose for reading is to become informed about something, while the overall purposes for writing are informing and persuading. Outside of work and school, people also read and write for entertainment.

Here are two tables from the Purdue Online Writing Lab—OWL: https://owl.purdue.edu/owl/general_writing/academic_writing/rhetorical_situation/purposes.html that show how these purposes are used in college and in the workplace.

Writers’ purposes:

Readers’ purposes

Purpose in our course

You will use purpose both in writing your own texts and in analyzing other writers’ texts.

Instructors often state the purpose of a writing assignment on the assignment sheet. In ENGL-090 and ENGL-095, most of your essay assignments will be informative: you will be summarizing and explaining the main points of written articles and texts.

However, your reading assignments will be both informative and persuasive. It is crucial to be able to figure out if the article or text you are reading is overall more informative, or overall more persuasive. This information will guide your response when you write about the text.

Sometimes it is easy to figure out a text’s purpose:

• A commercial or advertisement: persuasive
• A documentary on wild animals: informative
• A news article about crime in your neighborhood: informative
• An opinion or editorial in a news site: persuasive

The problem is that all writing includes both informative and persuasive elements. A commercial trying to sell you a specific brand of car will include information on fuel efficiency and other important facts, while a news article on panhandlers may include persuasive elements on local socioeconomic conditions driving people to beg for money in the streets. A key factor in determining a text’s purpose is to examine the target audience.

Readers read, and writers write, for several purposes. Consider the audience and purposes for the following texts:

• An email from a work colleague or supervisor
• A text from a friend
• An online news site
• An essay written for a college class
• A report written for your work supervisor
• A thank-you note