TEAS 7 · Reading · 5 min read
Author's Purpose, Point of View and Tone
- Identify the primary purpose of a passage and evaluate how the intended audience influences its structure and evidence.
- Distinguish between first-, second-, and third-person points of view, and identify author bias, objectivity, and subjectivity.
- Analyze tone, mood, and diction by examining word choice, connotation, sentence structure, and tone shifts.
Identifying the Author's Purpose and Audience
The author's purpose is the primary reason an author decides to write a passage. While an author may incorporate several techniques across a single text, a text may have more than one purpose; your goal is to identify its primary purpose when one predominates. In reading analysis, writing generally falls into four primary categories: to persuade, to inform, to entertain, and to explain.
Texts written to persuade aim to convince the reader to adopt a specific belief, attitude, or action. To achieve this, persuasive texts may use claims, supporting evidence, emotional appeals, and calls to action. Common examples of persuasive writing include editorials, advertisements, political speeches, and op-eds. In contrast, texts written primarily to inform aim to present accurate information rather than persuade the reader. Informational texts convey facts through verifiable evidence, statistics, definitions, or historical data. Works such as encyclopedias, scientific reports, and news articles are written primarily to inform.
The remaining categories focus on engagement and instruction. Texts written to entertain focus on engaging the reader through narrative craft, humor, suspense, or emotional resonance. Fictional novels, short stories, poems, and humorous essays are commonly written to entertain. Meanwhile, explanatory texts clarify how or why something happens, while instructional texts guide readers through steps to complete a task. How-to guides, recipes, and equipment operation manuals are examples of instructional texts. Across every genre, an author's intended audience heavily influences the passage's complexity, tone, and choice of evidence.
| Purpose Category | Core Objective | Common Features and Formats |
|---|---|---|
| To Persuade | Convince the reader to adopt a specific belief, attitude, or action | Uses claims, supporting evidence, emotional appeals, and calls to action; found in editorials, advertisements, political speeches, and op-eds |
| To Inform | Present accurate information rather than persuade the reader | Uses verifiable evidence, statistics, definitions, or historical data; found in encyclopedias, scientific reports, and news articles |
| To Entertain | Engage the reader through narrative craft, humor, suspense, or emotional resonance | Focuses on creative storytelling; found in fictional novels, short stories, poems, and humorous essays |
| To Explain or Instruct | Clarify how or why something happens, or guide readers through steps to complete a task | Provides procedural steps or explanations; found in how-to guides, recipes, and equipment operation manuals |
Common mistakes
- Confusing tone with mood by attributing the reader's emotional response to the author's attitude, rather than identifying the author's perspective.
- Failing to differentiate between third-person narration types, particularly assuming a text is omniscient when it only reveals the thoughts of a single character (limited) or no internal thoughts at all (objective).
- Overlooking bias because a text includes factual data, ignoring that an author may demonstrate bias through the selective presentation of evidence or the omission of relevant opposing viewpoints.
- Mistaking a secondary element, such as a humorous remark in an informational article or a factual statistic in an editorial, for the passage's primary purpose.
Key points
- The author's purpose is the primary reason for writing, categorized primarily as persuading, informing, entertaining, or explaining.
- The intended audience heavily influences the passage's complexity, tone, and choice of evidence.
- Point of view indicates the perspective of the text: first-person uses 'I' and 'we'; second-person uses 'you'; third-person uses 'he,' 'she,' 'it,' and 'they' across objective, limited, or omniscient frameworks.
- Bias involves an author's leaning or prejudice, identifiable through loaded words, selective evidence, and the omission of opposing views.
- Tone is the author's attitude toward the subject or audience, conveyed by diction, denotation, connotation, sentence structure, and punctuation clues.
- A tone shift marks a change in the author's attitude; contrast transitions may help locate one, but readers should confirm it through changes in diction, details, or other contextual clues.
- Tone is the author's attitude, whereas mood is the emotional feeling or atmosphere created within the reader through sensory details and physical setting descriptions.
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