Purposes For Text (1 Viewer)

[FroZenWaffleS]

Just have some homework to do with language features and the purpose of the text. And the thing is the purpose is quite difficult to find out. Its a narrative and narratives entertain but my teacher also said there could be more than one so is there a list of purposes out there???

The text is about some boat captain bragging about how good his wrecked ship is.
The other text is about a super war ship from WW2 that can kill anything except 4 warships.

 

[Trebla]

Some common purposes I've encountered are:
- to entertain...
- to inform...
- to persuade...
- to expose/question an issue or folly

However, these are rather generalised ideas of purposes. I think your teacher wants to look more specifically into purpose and to do that you need to study the text more closely. When you want to find out the purpose of a certain text you have to consider the audience it is aimed at and maybe the context it is in. Also, if you know the text well, then you can work out the purpose by considering the themes in the text. You'll notice a lot of them expose an issue in society. For example in 'To Kill A Mockingbird', one of the themes is justice and from that, a purpose can be worked out to be: to question society's justice system. (you should be more specific in reality, but I'm just giving a rough idea)