Purpose, Audience, and Context

No text floats free of the world. Every text is written by someone, for someone, in some situation, to do something. This lesson introduces the linked concepts of purpose, audience, and context, which together form the rhetorical situation. Reading well means reconstructing that situation, because a text's choices only make sense against the backdrop of what it is trying to accomplish and for whom.

Purpose

A text's purpose is what it aims to do: to inform, to persuade, to entertain, to instruct, to move, to sell, to warn. Many texts pursue several purposes at once—a charity advertisement may inform you about a crisis while persuading you to donate and moving you emotionally. Identifying purpose is not guessing the writer's mood; it is inferring the text's designed function from its feature