Author's purpose is the reason a writer
wrote a particular piece — what they were trying to do, what
effect they wanted to produce in the reader, what argument
they were making. The phrase is most familiar from American
high-school English teaching, where students are often asked
to identify the author's purpose from a short list of options.
The simple categories are useful as a starting point, but a
serious treatment of the question opens out into something
much harder.
The high-school categories: P.I.E.
The standard American-classroom mnemonic is P.I.E. —
Persuade, Inform, Entertain. Sometimes expanded to PIEED
(adding Express, Educate, Describe). The categories:
Persuade — change the reader's
opinion, action, or behaviour. Op-eds, sermons, ads,
Miller's The
Crucible.
Inform — give the reader knowledge they
didn't have. Textbooks, journalism, encyclopaedia
entries, this glossary.
Entertain — produce pleasure,
amusement, suspense, satisfaction. Most popular fiction,
most television.
Express — articulate the writer's
emotion or experience without primarily aiming at the
reader. Lyric poetry, the personal essay, the
diary.
Describe — convey a scene, place, or
thing accurately. Nature writing, travel writing,
ekphrasis.
Most real writing combines several of these. A novel
informs about a historical period, entertains with plot,
persuades the reader of a moral position, expresses the
writer's vision, and describes a world.
Why the simple categories often fail
The high-school exercise of choosing one purpose from a
list of four is artificial. Real writers usually have
overlapping, sometimes contradictory purposes. Some critical
problems with the framework:
Multiple purposes. Most serious
writing has at least two. Identifying "the" purpose is
a flattening.
Hidden purposes. Writers sometimes
pursue purposes they don't fully acknowledge to
themselves, let alone to the reader. The
subtext may be the real
purpose.
The intentional fallacy. William
Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley's 1946 essay argued that
the writer's intentions are not the right basis for
reading the work — the work itself is what we have to
go on. The argument has been contested but has shaped
academic literary criticism for seventy years.
Reception and use. A work's purpose
from the writer's side and its function for the reader
may be different. Orwell's 1984 has had
political uses he didn't predict.
How to actually identify purpose
The more useful question is not "what was the author's
purpose?" but "what work is this piece of writing
doing?" Asking the latter avoids the metaphysical question of
the writer's mind and stays with the textual evidence.
Specific things to look at:
Genre conventions. An op-ed has
different purposes than a novel; a love poem from a
legal brief. Genre is the first clue.
Tone. Persuasive writing usually has
a different
tone than
informative writing. Sarcasm, urgency, dispassion — each
points to purpose.
Choice of detail. What the writer
includes and excludes signals what they are working
toward. A piece that omits opposing evidence is
probably persuasive; a piece that catalogues opposing
evidence is probably more analytical.
Audience signals. Who is the writer
addressing? Specialised vocabulary signals a specialist
audience; accessible language a general one.
Structural emphasis. The position of
the strongest claims — beginning, climax, end — signals
what the writer wants to leave the reader with.
Purpose in fiction is harder
Fiction's relationship to purpose is unusually slippery.
Some readings:
Some novels do have a thesis.The Crucible
argues against McCarthyism;
1984 argues against
totalitarianism; Uncle Tom's Cabin argued
against slavery.
Most great novels resist single-thesis
readings. What is the "purpose" of
Anna Karenina? Ulysses? To the
Lighthouse? These books are doing something more
than persuasion — exploring, registering, witnessing.
The argument's-purpose model is itself a
narrowing. Treating every text as if it
"wanted" to do one thing risks missing what literature
uniquely offers: language doing more than instrumental
work.
How to read it in context
Use the P.I.E. categories as a starting checklist, not as
a destination. Ask: what is this piece trying to do? Then
expand to: what else is it doing? What unintended effects
might it produce? What would a sceptical reader say its
"real" purpose was, beyond what the author would say? The
question of purpose is most useful when it leads to better
questions, not when it settles on a single answer.
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