PURPOSE AS INTENTION
“Writers at work do not decide on ‘their purpose’ as the textbooks advise; they create a web of purposes.
They set goals, toss up possibilities… They create a multidimensional network of information – a web that
radiates in all directions, anchored to points unknown.”
Linda Flower, The Construction of Purpose in Reading and Writing
This distinction that Flower draws between a singular sense of purpose and a complex web of purpose is
an important one. Even something as seemingly straightforward as an article about a local sporting event
will have the overarching purpose of relaying an account of an event, while at the same time the writer is
trying to drum up support for a team and present himself as both an impartial reporter and a fervent fan.
George Hillocks Jr presents a useful way for us to analyze aspects of our purpose in a writing project. He
divides purpose into the substantive, affective and ethical:
• substantive – what do you want to say?
• affective – what effect do you want to have on your audience?
• ethical – how do you want readers to perceive you as the writer (your ethos)?
These general guidelines should be applied to all levels of inquiry and not taken as merely the three kinds
of purpose that replace a singular one. Different aspects will operate in different ways at different points
in a piece of writing and at different levels of analysis.
PURPOSE AS PRODUCT
James Kinneavy conceived of perhaps the best-known taxonomy of discourse types organized in terms of
purpose:
• Expressive writing focuses on the writer's experience and motives
• Exploratory writing asks questions
• Informative writing answers questions
• Scientific writing provides proof for its assertions
• Literary writing invites attention to the message itself
• Persuasive writing attempts to change the views or behavior of the reader.
James Britton imagined a continuum of discourse, placing the transactional and the poetic on opposite
ends of the spectrum, with the expressive occupying the middle distance:
• writing in the transactional-expressive range aims to get specific things accomplished
• writing in the poetic-expressive range exists as an end in and of itself.
Yet another taxonomy was developed by yet another James, with James Moffet positing four distinct
discourse-purpose pairings:
• drama, that reflects what is happening
• narrative, to tell about the past
• exposition, generalizing about what happens
• argumentation, which proposes theories about what might happen
While these taxonomies serve (excuse the pun) a purpose, they are each also limiting in some respect. It is
easy to imagine a piece of writing that fits into more than one category in Kinneavy and Moffett’s
schemes, and Britton’s covers form but doesn’t say much about content. The taxonomies are best used as
a guide to focus your thinking on what your writing will look like and what it will, hopefully, do.