Examining Author’s Purpose and Craft

For the remainder of the school year, students will be examining author’s purpose and craft, specifically how both of these things impact the reader.

For example,  my friend Christina Greer has a book coming out entitled Everything’s Jake which focuses on mental health in young boys.  Greer states, “Mental health issues affect so many of today’s youth. Everything’s Jake was written for any teen trying to navigate their way, particularly boys, who feel they might be living their life ‘off on the sidelines.'”

Knowing an author’s purpose can impact the reader’s experience with the text.

For example, Elie Wiesel, Holocaust survivor and Night, shares that he wrote the memoir for several reasons:  1) to share man’s inhumanity to man and 2) in hopes that such atrocities will never happen again.

I look forward to sharing Wiesel’s memoir with my students as we dive deeper into two of our essential standard for LA4:

• 10.5: Analyze in detail how an author’s ideas or claims are developed and refined by particular sentences, paragraphs, or larger portions of a text (e.g., a section or chapter).
• 10.6: Determine an author’s point of view or purpose in a text and analyze how an author uses rhetoric to advance that point of view or purpose.