Purpose (VCE SSCE English): Revision Notes
Purpose
What is purpose in writing?
The purpose of a piece of writing is what the author wants to achieve—their intent. Every text has a purpose, even personal writing like a diary entry. A diary might exist to capture thoughts and feelings, express strong emotions, or preserve memories for the future.
Writing isn't always personal. Your purpose might relate directly to your audience. Perhaps you want readers to experience a powerful emotion such as joy, sadness, guilt or fear. Or maybe you want them to take action—buying a product, joining a club, or signing a petition.
Understanding your purpose is crucial because it shapes every choice you make as a writer. Your purpose will determine the vocabulary you select, the structures you build, and the language features you employ.
Consider this: if you're writing to express ideas and emotions, filling your text with statistics and data would likely bore your audience. However, if you're arguing for a particular viewpoint, facts and figures become essential evidence supporting your position.
Tone, style and language register
These three elements work together to help you achieve your purpose:
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Tone refers to the mood or feeling expressed in your writing. It conveys your attitude towards the subject and audience.
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Style describes the way a text is written—it might be plain, poetic, colourful, minimalist, or ornate. Your style encompasses your word choices, sentence structures, and overall approach to language.
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Language register is an aspect of style that indicates the level of formality in your writing. It exists on a spectrum from highly formal to informal or colloquial. The register you choose depends on your audience and purpose.
The connection between these elements and purpose is direct. When writing to explain, your language will likely be more formal and measured than when writing to express. Similarly, your tone in reflective writing will differ significantly from your tone in persuasive writing.
The four main purposes
Writers generally craft texts to achieve one of four main purposes, though these aren't completely distinct and often overlap in practice. A documentary, for instance, might explain various aspects of a controversial issue whilst also arguing for a particular course of action.
Purpose overview
To express – Common text types include blog posts, poems, and short stories. These texts explore and share ideas, experiences, and emotions. They often aim to entertain, delight, or arouse sympathies.
To explain – Common text types include news articles, documentaries, and essays. Also called expository or informative writing, these texts seek to inform audiences, offer reasons, and make connections.
To reflect – Common text types include journals, memoirs, and diaries. Reflective writing involves looking back on experiences, making sense of them, and exploring how they've shaped your understanding.
To argue – Common text types include opinion pieces, editorials, and speeches. Also called persuasive writing, these texts present arguments to convince others to agree with a particular viewpoint.
Remember that many text types can serve different purposes. An essay, for example, can be crafted to reflect, explain, or argue, depending on the writer's intent.
Crafting texts to express
Many texts you encounter daily are designed to explore and share ideas, experiences, and emotions. The television programmes you watch, novels you read, and social media posts you engage with all express their creators' views on aspects of the world and human nature. These texts often provide entertainment—crafted to amuse and delight, arouse emotions and sympathies, or appeal to fantasy and imagination.
Your goal when writing to express
Keep your audience interested and engaged in the story you're telling. An effective short story might feature a well-structured plot, inventive characterisation, and sharp, realistic dialogue. A novel might employ cliffhangers at chapter ends or weave humour into moments of tension and sadness.
Essential elements for expressive writing
To make your expressive writing compelling and interesting, include as many of these elements as possible:
- Believable characters – Create characters readers can relate to and care about
- Strong content and ideas – Develop meaningful themes and insights
- Varied rhythm and structure – Mix short and long sentences to create flow and emphasis
- A strong start and ending – Hook readers immediately and leave them satisfied
- Realistic dialogue – Make conversations sound natural and authentic
- Moments of conflict and tension – Keep readers engaged through challenges and obstacles
- An immersive setting – Build a world readers can visualise and experience
Example: Writing to express
Consider this excerpt from Louis Sachar's novel Holes (1998). The author paints a picture for readers whilst establishing characters and introducing tension. Notice how the passage generates sympathy for Stanley and expresses ideas about isolation and cruelty:
He didn't have any friends at home. He was overweight and the kids at his middle school often teased him about his size. Even his teachers sometimes made cruel comments without realising it. On his last day of school, his maths teacher, Mrs. Bell, taught ratios. As an example, she chose the heaviest kid in the class and the lightest kid in the class, and had them weigh themselves. Stanley weighed three times as much as the other boy. Mrs. Bell wrote the ratio on the board, 3:1, unaware of how much embarrassment she had caused both of them.
Stanley was arrested later that day.
What makes this effective:
- The characterisation develops not just the two boys but also the insensitive teacher
- The final line creates intrigue and tension
- It reveals Stanley's harsh life before being sent to Camp Green Lake
Crafting texts to explain
Writing to explain, sometimes called expository or informative writing, seeks to inform audiences, offer reasons, and make connections. When your purpose is to explain, you want to improve your audience's understanding of a topic.
Forms of explanatory writing
Explanatory writing takes many forms, from simple instruction manuals to lengthy texts outlining complex ideas. Your textbooks essentially explain, as do research papers, reports, and presentations.
Although writing to explain relies heavily on facts, it also depends on the author's understanding to connect cause and effect and draw conclusions. This requires judgement and logical reasoning, meaning there's a subjective element—even an element of argument—in expository writing. However, persuading readers to agree isn't the primary purpose.
Techniques for effective explanatory writing
When crafting an expository text:
- Use clear, concise language and a logical, flowing structure
- Place the most important information at the start
- Include several ideas and arguments
- Research your topic thoroughly and consider all sides
- Appeal to your audience's sense of reason rather than their emotions
- Remember: your purpose is to engage readers' heads, not their hearts
Five approaches to explanatory writing
Problem and solution – Identify the problem, provide details to explain it, then outline a solution.
Cause and effect – Explain why something happened and what its effects will be.
Compare and contrast – Discuss the similarities and differences between two things.
Definition and classification – Provide a complete, systematic description of the topic.
How-to / Process – Tell the audience about a task or process and how to complete it.
Example: Writing to explain
The following features appear in an article from The Conversation about extreme rainfall in eastern Australia during February and March 2022. The authors describe what is happening, then explain why:
Effective explanatory techniques used:
- Provides information about what's happening
- Uses hyperlinked words to enable readers to access extra information without overcomplicating the main text
- Employs logical language typical of explanations
- Makes predictions based on scientific understanding
- Uses subheadings and dot-point lists typical of reports
- Provides context for the situation
Building credibility:
- The authors' expertise as academics in relevant university departments adds authority
- Use of specialised language and concepts makes their explanations credible
- Terms remain accessible to educated readers, appropriate for The Conversation's readership
Engaging the reader:
- Asks simple questions readers might have, then provides clear answers
- Uses informal language in places to make explanations accessible
- Provides technical details and specialised vocabulary that reflects the scientific subject matter
- Begins to explain the causes of extreme rainfall through discussion of climate oscillations like ENSO, SAM, and IOD
Crafting texts to reflect
Reflective writing is about you, the author. Reflective writing and thinking involve looking back on an experience, trying to make sense of it, and considering how it has shaped your understanding of other experiences and events. You might think about lessons learned and what could have been done differently to change the outcome. When you write reflectively, you gain insights whilst giving readers insights into their own experiences.
Reflecting on key ideas
If you choose to craft a reflective text for this area of study, you'll likely examine a key idea through the lens of your personal reflections. In other words, you'll explore your key idea in a very personal way. For example, if you're writing on the key idea of identity, you could reflect on an experience that helped shape or change your own identity.
The DIEP model for reflective writing
When writing reflectively, this process helps you get ideas on the page in a clear, coherent structure. Known as the DIEP model, this process can be applied to any mode of reflective writing:
Describe
- What happened?
- What did you do or find out?
Interpret
- What does the experience mean to you?
- Why?
Evaluate
- How significant or valuable was your experience?
- Why?
Plan
- How will you apply what you have learned?
- What do you hope to achieve as a result?
Example: Writing to reflect
Below is an extract from Anne Frank's The Diary of a Young Girl. She wrote most of the diary whilst she and her family were hiding in an attic in Amsterdam to avoid capture by the Nazis during World War II. This example shows the describe and interpret elements of the DIEP process:
Today I have nothing but dismal and depressing news to report. Our many Jewish friends and acquaintances are being taken away in droves. The Gestapo is treating them very roughly and transporting them in cattle-trucks to Westerbork, the big camp in Drenthe to which they're sending all the Jews...
If it's that bad in Holland, what must it be like in those faraway and uncivilised places where the Germans are sending them? We assume that most of them are being murdered. The English radio says they're being gassed. Perhaps that's the quickest way to die.
I feel terrible. Miep's accounts of these horrors are so heartrending... Fine specimens of humanity, those Germans, and to think I'm actually one of them! No, that's not true, Hitler took away our nationality long ago. And besides, there are no greater enemies on earth than the Germans and the Jews.
Reflective elements present:
- The writer reflects on what is happening to people she knows
- Provides details of events in the outside world
- Reflects on her own feelings in response
- Begins to interpret the significance of these events whilst reflecting on her own identity
Crafting texts to argue
A text that presents an argument to convince others to agree is known as persuasive writing. Whilst you'll analyse persuasive writing in more depth in Area of Study 2: Exploring argument, in Crafting texts the focus is on presenting your own argument on an idea or issue.
Components of an effective argument
Your argument will consist of a central contention or point of view, and supporting reasons backed up by evidence and logical reasoning. For instance, for the key idea Writing about crisis, possible positions might include: The world overreacted to COVID-19, Human beings must act to stop climate change, or The world should abolish nuclear weapons.
To construct an argument supporting any position, you need to research, find relevant facts, and identify several strong reasons for holding this position.
Keys to successful persuasive writing
An effective argument depends first and foremost on thorough knowledge of the subject. Here are the essential elements:
Topic – Pick a topic you're interested in. Writing or speaking about something you care about is much easier than tackling a topic that doesn't really matter to you.
Audience – Know your audience; research their interests and expectations. Tailor your language, arguments, and persuasive techniques to your specific audience.
Contention – Develop a strong contention—your point of view. Bring your arguments and reasons back to your contention.
Credibility – Establish and build your credibility with your audience. If you're adopting a persona, make sure it's one you understand.
Know the issue – Research both sides of the issue. Find and use up-to-date information and opinions.
Avoid an info dump – Use a range of persuasive techniques, not just facts and figures.
Example: Writing to argue
The following excerpts from an opinion piece published in The Age in January 2022 demonstrate effective persuasive writing. The author argues in favour of the four-day working week:
Opening strategy:
- Uses a conversational style and friendly tone
- Includes anecdotes about summer and Christmas in Australia, making the topic relevant to the audience
- Uses direct address and rhetorical questions to engage readers
Building the argument:
- The style becomes more formal, presenting evidence from New Zealand and Britain
- Cites reputable sources like The New York Times
- Places the issue in a global context, giving it more weight
Persuasive techniques:
- Suggests Australia is falling behind the rest of the world
- Uses an implicit comparison between Australia and Britain
- Leads readers to feel Australia needs to catch up by trying something similar
- Ends with an appeal to patriotism and a call to action
Key Points to Remember:
- Every piece of writing has a purpose—what the author wants to achieve
- Your purpose shapes your vocabulary, structure, and language features
- The four main purposes are: to express, to explain, to reflect, and to argue
- Tone, style, and language register must match your purpose
- Different text types can serve different purposes
- Strong writing often combines elements of multiple purposes to engage readers effectively