Author's Purpose: Bringing the FAT-P to Readers' Workshop

We all know that the Super RUPR has a trusty sidekick, the FAT-P.  Culinary Court writers came to rely on these superheros when preparing to respond to a prompt.  But how can Culinary Court readers use the FAT-P to help them as they're reading?

First, let's remember what FAT-P stands for:

Format
Audience
Topic
Purpose

As writers, we've learned to always keep our audience in mind.  We should be aware of them and write to help them understand our main ideas and purpose for writing.  As readers, we can remember how we planned our writing specifically to support our main ideas and make our meaning clear to our readers.  And, if we did this as writers, wouldn't it seem logical that professional writers might do this to help us?

We know authors write for a variety of purposes. We know three main purposes are to explain (teach), entertain, and persuade.  Often the format an author chooses can help us determine the purpose, but it's not always that simple.  Being the sophisticated readers we are, we know that writing purposes often overlap.  One piece of writing might be written for more than one of these purposes.  For instance, in the poem "Dreams" by Langston Hughes, we know that Mr. Hughes is writing both to persuade and entertain.

Dreams

Hold fast to dreams
For if dreams die
Life is a broken-winged bird
That cannot fly.
Hold fast to dreams
For when dreams go
Life is a barren field
Frozen with snow.

~Langston Hughes

As we discussed in class, the main purpose of this poem is to persuade readers, but Mr. Hughes also wanted his reader to be entertained, which is why he chose the format of a poem.

Considering the format and genre of a piece of writing can be very revealing when discovering an author's purpose, but there are exceptions.  For instance, we've read many pieces of text recently about slavery and the Underground Railroad.  The Storyworks article, "From Slavery to Freedom", is jam-packed with facts and details, teaching its readers all about Harriet Tubman and her accomplishments on the Underground Railroad.  It isn't surprising that the main purpose of this article is to teach or explain, as articles are most commonly linked with informing.  However, any story that is also based on true facts, such as Henry's Freedom Box, is also written to teach.  Authors of true stories, or narrative nonfiction, considered their audience and topic when they determined their format, selecting a format that would allow them to teach while they were also entertaining.  As another example, folk tales and fables, though they are considered a genre of fiction today, were originally told to teach or explain.  Because newspapers, magazines, textbooks and the internet did not exist when these stories were first told, elders orally told tales, or stories, for the purpose of explaining parts of the natural world, such as why the tortoise has a "cracked" shell, and teaching life lessons, such as the importance of telling the truth.

Understanding the main purpose is just the first step to determining the complete author's purpose.  An author's purpose also includes the main idea of the piece.  Take, for example, this blog post.  Considering first the format, a blog post, we begin to understand that this article is written to inform.  But readers will miss the boat if that's all they know.  What are the important main ideas of this blog post?  What lessons am I, the writer, trying to teach my audience?  Combining the main idea(s) of a text with the purpose will help a reader fully comprehend what they've read.

In the coming weeks, readers will analyze a variety of nonfiction pieces to determine how the author organized their writing to support their purpose.  We will use signal words and identify important ideas within each text to determine what text structure, or organization method, each writer used.  Then, we'll use this understanding to help us create a complete author's purpose statement.

***Psssst!  Reader-writers, did you spy an idiom in this post?  Where is it?  What does it mean?***