Purpose

Purpose and Audience are the two most important concepts in writing.

They will show you what you need to say and how to say it. They will tell you what to take out and what to develop more fully. And once you think about purpose and audience a little, once you apply it to your paper, your thinking will begin to handle it automatically. You’ll be well on your way toward becoming an effective writer.

Your purpose = whatever you hope to accomplish with your paper.

Common purposes are to inform, to entertain, to get a good grade, to move readers to action, to convince, etc.

One paper may have many purposes, although one usually stands out.

The most useful purposes, however, are not left as vague and general as those listed in the table above. If you plan to simply "inform," you could ramble on and on about anything you wanted and still accomplish your purpose. Take a moment now to create a well-developped specific-purpose statement, something like "to inform readers about the pros and cons of building a public skate park in my hometown". If you have a specific purpose statement, your writing will flow more easily and the final paper will be more effective. (If you haven't chosen a paper topic yet, find help here.)

You can see how changing the purpose from an informative one to a persuasive one further changes your tactics. You can’t say you want to "persuade readers about the pros and cons of building a public skate park in my hometown." Such a statement contains no clear persuasive purpose. Using such a purpose statement in this class may cause you unnecessary stress and effort for you and result in a lower grade. A better specific purpose statement for the persuasive paper might be "to persuade [insert your specific audience here] to take specific steps toward building a public skate park in [insert your hometown here]."

Be sure to consider your purpose’s and audience’s inherent barriers as well. If you can’t overcome them all, either choose another topic or adjust your purpose, audience, or focus. In other words, choose a purpose that you believe you can acheive (that means you can convince your audience, not just yourself).

Read on about how choosing a specific audience further clarifies your task or how to further define your clear persuasive purpose.

What's the big idea?

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