Purpose

COMP3040 > The Writing Process

Introduction

Before you begin writing your document, the first thing you need to do is determine the purpose of your document. Knowing the purpose will help you communicate successfully with the document's audience. You'll have a better idea of what information you'll need, how to organize it, what style of writing you should choose, and even how much to write. Writing with a purpose will give your document a sense of direction and clarity, leading to an overall better document.

...by students How Purpose Helped Me I remember when the topic of purpose first came up in class. When we were asked the crucial question of why we were writing Assignment One, my first thought was, 'So I can get a good grade and pass this course.' However, our first assignment had us writing three separate documents, each for a different group. Deciding on each document's purpose, and what I wanted the readers to get out of it, helped me in planning each document's structure, tone, and information. Purpose Statement The first step to choosing a purpose is writing a purpose statement. The purpose statement will guide every decision you make as you plan, draft, and revise your document. In order to create this statement, we need to consider the following two questions: Why Am I Writing This Document? It's important to know why you're writing. For many of us students in a writing-focused class, our immediate reason may be to simply get a good grade. Getting a good grade is admittedly a good reason, but it's often not enough if our document will be read by a larger audience than just our instructor. In order to communicate effectively with that audience, consider why you're writing to them. Are you trying to entertain them? Share ideas and opinions? Inform with facts? Argue a series of points? You may even combine purposes within a single paper. Whatever purpose you determine for your document, the mood will be affected. The answer to why you're writing a document should fit into one sentence. This will help to form your purpose statement. Here's an example. I am writing this "Purpose" wiki article to inform people, most likely students interested in Technical Communication, about why it is important to write with purpose, and how to go about doing this. What Response Do I Want From Readers? Your document's purpose will invariably depend on the result you're looking for. For example, if we're writing a newspaper column about university volunteering, we may want to encourage readers to participate. Thus, our desired result would have our readers rushing off to volunteer at a university. Since we have this in mind, it will affect how we write our document. The response I want from readers is to feel informed and knowledgeable about the importance of writing with a purpose in mind. They will hopefully determine a purpose to their writing before beginning any future documents. Combining the answers from the two questions mentioned above gives us our purpose statement. Now that we have this, the next step in the writing process is considering our document's audience. We'll talk about audience in the next topic. Further Readings Reid, Stephen, Barnes, Luann, Kowalski, Dawn. Understanding Your Purpose. http://writing.colostate.edu/guides/processes/purpose/index.cfm. http://grammar.ccc.commnet.edu/GRAMMAR/composition/purpose.htm http://www.kimskorner4teachertalk.com/writing/modes/definitions.html References Boogerd, Jan, Pfeiffer, William Sanborn, Technical Communication - A Practical Approach, Pearson Education Canada, Toronto, 2007. Reid, Stephen, Barnes, Luann, Kowalski, Dawn. Understanding Your Purpose. http://writing.colostate.edu/guides/processes/purpose/index.cfm. http://grammar.ccc.commnet.edu/GRAMMAR/composition/purpose.htm