Author's Purpose: Why the Writer Wrote It
A 45-minute reading lesson that separates a writer's purpose from the writer's topic, using three short pieces about the same subject so the only thing students can compare is how each one is built.
Reading
Subject
Grades 3-5
Grade Level
45 minutes
Duration
Author's Purpose
Topic
On this page: Materials · Warm-Up · Direct Instruction · Guided Practice · Independent Practice · Assessment · Closure · Related Resources
Learning Objectives
By the end of this lesson, students will be able to:
- Explain that an author's purpose is what the writer wanted the reader to do or feel
- Name the three common purposes: to persuade, to inform, and to entertain
- Tell the difference between what a text is about and why it was written
- Point to evidence in a text that supports a claim about its purpose
- Explain that one text can have more than one purpose
Materials
- Author's Purpose Worksheet — one copy per student
- Author's Purpose Poster, printed for the wall — free, no sign-in needed
- Three short texts on one shared topic, roughly a paragraph each (see Preparation)
- A real advertisement, a page from a nonfiction book, and a joke book or comic
Vocabulary
- Author's purpose — the reason a writer wrote a text
- Persuade — to try to make the reader think, believe, or do something
- Inform — to give the reader facts and information
- Entertain — to make the reader enjoy the reading
- Topic — what a text is about
- Evidence — the part of the text you can point to that supports your answer
- Audience — the people the writer is writing for
Preparation
Write or find three short pieces on one topic. Dogs works well: a paragraph arguing the school should allow a class pet, a paragraph of facts about how dogs hear, and a short funny story about a dog stealing a sandwich. Keep them to five or six sentences each and put all three on one sheet.
The shared topic is the design of the lesson, not a convenience. If the three texts are about three different subjects, students sort them by subject and get every answer right without ever looking at the writing — and you learn nothing about whether they can do this.
Collect three real objects too: an ad, a nonfiction page, and something funny. Real texts carry signals that classroom paragraphs flatten out, and students recognize them.
Print the author’s purpose poster before the lesson and put it where students can see it from their desks. It is free and needs no sign-in, and having the three purposes visible during independent work is worth more than having them memorized.
Warm-Up
5 minutes. Hold up the three real texts one at a time — the ad, the nonfiction page, the joke book — and ask a single question about each: what did the person who made this want from you?
Do not use the words persuade, inform or entertain yet. Let the class answer in their own language: they want me to buy it, they want me to know something, they want me to laugh. Write those answers up in the students’ words.
Then say that every piece of writing was made by a person who wanted something, that those three answers have names, and that readers who can spot which one they are looking at read differently — more carefully, and more suspiciously, when it matters.
Direct Instruction
12 minutes. Name the three purposes and attach each one to an answer the class already gave, so the vocabulary lands on thinking they have already done rather than arriving cold.
- To persuade — the writer wants you to think or do something.
- To inform — the writer wants you to know something.
- To entertain — the writer wants you to enjoy it.
Now hand out the three-paragraph sheet and make the central move: all three of these are about dogs. The topic is identical. So the topic cannot be what tells you the purpose.
Read the persuading paragraph aloud and think out loud about what gives it away. It is not the subject. It is the opinion words, the reasons stacked up, and the fact that it asks for something at the end. Underline those on the board rather than describing them.
Do the same for the informing paragraph — facts you could check, no opinion, often headings or numbers — and the entertaining one, which has characters and something that happens and is written to be enjoyed rather than used.
Then make the difference explicit and hold it there, because it is the thing that most often goes wrong: what is this about? and why was it written? are two different questions with two different answers, and a funny topic does not make the purpose "to entertain."
Finish by complicating it honestly. Show a nature documentary clip description, or a well-written nonfiction page, and ask whether it informs or entertains. It does both. Say plainly that one text can have more than one purpose, and that the useful question is which one the writer put first.
Guided Practice
13 minutes. Pairs sort a set of short texts — a recipe, a poster for a school election, a poem, a cereal box, a set of instructions, a comic strip — and for each one write the purpose and the words that gave it away.
Requiring the evidence is the whole exercise. Without it, sorting into three piles is a guessing game with a one-in-three floor, and students who are guessing look identical to students who are reading.
Then give them the ones that argue back:
- A charity leaflet that is full of facts — but why is it telling you them?
- A funny ad — it made you laugh, so is that the purpose?
- A history book written to be a good read.
Let the disagreement run for a minute before settling it. "It does both, and here is which one I think came first, because…" is a better answer than a confident single label, and it is the answer older readers actually need.
Students then work the Author’s Purpose Worksheet in pairs while you circulate. The prompt that does the most work is show me the words.
Independent Practice
10 minutes. Students complete the worksheet alone, then take one text they have identified and write a sentence explaining the purpose with a quotation from the text as evidence.
The written explanation is the transfer step. Circling a label can be done from a feeling; writing the author wants us to… because the text says… cannot, and it is the form the skill takes in every test and every piece of real reading afterwards.
For a class ready to be pushed, ask them to rewrite two sentences of an informing text so that it persuades instead. Changing the purpose while keeping the topic is the clearest proof a student understands that the two are separate.
Assessment
3 minutes. Exit ticket, three items, using a short paragraph printed on the ticket. What is this text about? Why did the author write it? Then: Write one phrase from the text that shows you are right.
The first two items being asked separately is deliberate — a student who writes the same answer twice has not yet separated topic from purpose, and that is the single most useful thing this ticket can tell you.
Closure
2 minutes. Hold up the ad from the warm-up again and ask the class what it wants from them, now that they have a word for it. Close on the sentence the lesson earns: everything you read was written by somebody who wanted something, and a reader who asks what that was is much harder to talk into things.
Differentiation and Accommodations
- Extra support: work with two purposes rather than three, and use whole real objects instead of paragraphs — an ad against a fact page. Two categories sorted for genuine reasons beats three sorted by guesswork, and the third purpose can be a second lesson. Keep the poster in the student’s eyeline rather than on the far wall.
- Extension: move from purpose to method with persuasive techniques. Once a student can say a text is trying to persuade them, the next question is how — and that is where advertising stops working on them.
- Common difficulty: answering with the topic. Asked why the author wrote it, the student writes "about volcanoes." Ask the follow-up out loud — "and what did they want you to do about volcanoes?" — and the gap usually closes in one turn.
- Watch for: students who label anything with a story as entertain and anything with facts as inform, without reading either. The tell is speed. Give them the charity leaflet, which is all facts and is not there to inform.
Extension Activities
The natural companion is author’s tone: purpose is what the writer wanted, tone is how they sound while doing it, and the two together are most of what students need to read persuasive writing well.
This pairs closely with main idea and supporting details — the main idea is what the text says, the purpose is why it says it, and asking both of one passage takes about two extra minutes.
Run it on the real world for a week. Bring in one text a day from outside school — a sign, a leaflet, a headline, the back of a packet — and spend two minutes on why it was written. Students start bringing their own in, which is when you know it has landed.
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