Writing with a Sense of Purpose

It's important to know why you're writing. If your purpose in writing is to please your instructor or to get a better grade, that may not be enough. Many instructors devise strategies to persuade their students to write for a larger community — publishing students' best work in a newsletter or online publication, asking students to send their papers to local newspapers, putting their best papers in a collection in the college library — something that allows students to feel that more than one person, sitting alone at the kitchen table, is going to read this bit of writing. Knowing that there is more than one person to please, a public "out there," is a motivation in itself to do well, to communicate clearly. It will help establish, also, that consistent sense of tone that is so important to a paper's success.

Beyond that feeling that there is an audience out there, waiting breathlessly for this paper you're working on, it helps to have a clear sense of what you're trying to do for this audience. Are you trying to entertain them? That is surely a lofty purpose: writing to lighten someone's spirits is not a project to be undertaken lightly. Is your paper a matter of self-expression? Do you have opinions or feelings that you need to share with others? Are you trying to persuade others that you have a view of things that is clear-sighted, useful, and needs to be shared? Or that someone else's position is faulty, muddle-headed, or otherwise wrong? Are you trying to provide an exposition of facts or process or definition that others can take advantage of, or are you trying to persuade them of the rightness of a moral or ethical position? Do you want your audience to read your paper and then act, filled with new energy because of what you've told them? The objectivity, mood, and earnestness of your prose will be determined by this attitude or sense of purpose.

The writing process is normally aided by a sense of pressure. This paper that we're working on is something that has to be written — not just because we must please our writing instructors or because we need a good grade in this course (those pressures have their own sense of emergency) but because there is information or a point of view that we need to share with the reader. Karl Schnapp, an English professor at Naugatuck Valley Community College in Waterbury, Connecticut, calls this sense of pressure exigence.

The pressure to write is determined by the relationship between you as writer and the audience you're trying to reach and affect. Let's examine two essay beginnings with an eye toward determining the writer's purpose and how that sense of purpose establishes tone and word choice. Let's say that for a course in Art Appreciation we have to write (there's a bit of pressure right there!) a brief analysis of a famous painting by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Landscape with the Fall of Icarus (c. 1558; Oil on canvas, mounted on wood, 73.5 x 112 cm; Musees royaux des Beaux-Arts de Belgique, Brussels). [Clicking on the image below will call up a larger version of the same painting —179 kb, not recommended with slow connections.] As you read the beginnings, think about the relationship between writer and audience and how this might have influenced how the writer wrote as he or she did.