Author's Purpose | Mini Lesson
Students will analyze how authors use writing choices to inform, persuade, and entertain, with emphasis on identifying purpose in challenging Grade 10-level texts and explaining how text evidence reveals that purpose.
| Term | Definition |
|---|---|
| Author’s purpose | The reason an author writes a text. |
| Inform | To teach, explain, or provide facts. |
| Persuade | To convince the reader to think, feel, or act a certain way. |
| Entertain | To amuse, engage, or tell a story for enjoyment. |
| Text evidence | Words, phrases, or details from the text that support an answer. |
| Tone | The author’s attitude toward the topic or audience. |
| Structure | How a text is organized to achieve a purpose. |
Display three short statements from different texts. Ask students to quickly determine each author’s purpose and justify with one clue.
Individually write quick responses, then share one answer with a partner.
Review the three common purposes and explain that strong texts may combine purposes. Model a think-aloud on a challenging excerpt, highlighting word choice, tone, and structure that reveal purpose. Write a sample claim and evidence sentence.
Take notes, annotate the model text, and identify the clues the teacher highlights.
Provide a new passage and lead students through a structured analysis: What is the topic? What does the author want readers to think, feel, or do? Which details support that idea?
Annotate the passage, discuss in pairs, and complete a short organizer with purpose and evidence.
Circulate, confer, and prompt students to move beyond naming the purpose by explaining how specific language choices support it.
Independently read a second passage and write a constructed response identifying author’s purpose with at least two pieces of evidence.
Collect student responses or administer an exit ticket asking students to determine purpose from a brief unseen excerpt and explain their reasoning.
Respond independently in complete sentences using text evidence.
Review key takeaways: purpose is determined by evidence, not guesswork; strong readers look at tone, structure, and word choice. Invite a few students to share a strategy they used.
Share one learning and one strategy for finding author’s purpose in future reading.
Reinforce that author’s purpose is proven through clues in the text. Students leave with a final reminder: ask what the author wants the reader to know, think, feel, or do.
Students complete an exit ticket or brief constructed response analyzing an unseen excerpt for author’s purpose and supporting their claim with textual evidence.