Teaching with a Middle School Author's Purpose Worksheet

Teaching with a middle school author's purpose worksheet can be useful for any teacher. When teaching English to middle school students, it is important to help them recognize that each piece of writing has a purpose or a specific point or goal.  Many students think that writing is pointless, and struggle with their schoolwork because they can’t figure out how it applies to their lives.  They often don’t realize that texts like advertisements, comic books, plays, and song lyrics are considered writing.  If they can come to recognize that different types of writing exist, each with its own unique purpose, their perspectives may change.  Once they come to understand that they themselves can write with a specific purpose in mind, their eyes are often opened to the power of the written word.

Teaching with a Middle School Author's Purpose Worksheet

An Author’s Purpose worksheet gives middle school students a place to note what they see as the purpose of different examples of writing. Several worksheets can be found at various online websites including those listed below:

E Reading Worksheets

E Reading Worksheets provides a variety of different worksheets for middle school teachers, including an Author's Purpose worksheet.  

• The sheets can be viewed in a web window, as a PDF file, or as a writable word document. 
• The site also contains a nice lesson plan with a review activity on determining an author’s purpose.  This can be viewed as a Power Point slide show or in your web browser. 

K-12.PISD.Edu

When you are ready to have your students write various types of pieces of their own, helpful information can be found at K-12.PISD.Edu. 

• This document gives students tips on how to strengthen their arguments in persuasive pieces, details to include when writing a personal narrative, elements to flesh out when writing a story (plot, characters, etc.), and how to write comparison pieces. 
• It also talks about explanatory writing.

Slide Boom

If you’d like to include definitions of descriptive and explanatory writing, another Power Point presentation that walks through the purposes of writing can be found at Slide Boom.

Teaching Tips for a Author's Purpose Worksheet

Now that you know where you can find some Author's Purpose worksheets and related activity or lesson plans, you may want to learn a little more about actually teaching middle school students with an Author's Purpose worksheet or about how to help your middle school students learn the purpose of a given piece of writing:

• On a basic level, the purposes of writing are to entertain, inform, or persuade. 
• Students should be given the definition of each purpose, along with several examples to illustrate each definition.
• Writing to entertain is known as narrative writing, and includes stories, plays, and poetry. 
• Writing that is used to inform is known as expository writing. 
• Expository pieces can more easily be identified if the students see the word expose in expository; this may help them remember that expository writing is used to expose – to show or explain facts. 
• Writing to persuade is done to influence the reader to perform an action or think a certain way, and is known as persuasive writing.  Usually an argument is presented in persuasive writing.

After the students are given the definitions, the students’ abilities to distinguish one purpose from another can be developed by practice – reading a description of a piece of writing or an actual piece of writing (short samples work best at first – a sentence or two will do) – and determining which of the three purposes best fits the description.

Students can also do this in reverse by being asked to find examples of narrative, persuasive, and expository writing.