You will need to consider purpose and audience when analysing any non-fiction text for your GCSEs. These two concepts relate to the following questions:
- What is the text trying to achieve?
- Who is the text aimed at?
Texts serve a wide range of purposes, which can vary depending on the type of text and the context in which it is created and consumed. When analysing texts, there are some everyday purposes that you should think about.
- Informative: Texts often aim to provide information, facts, or explanations about a particular topic, event, concept, or issue.
- Persuasive: Many texts are designed to persuade or convince the audience to adopt a particular point of view, take specific actions, or make particular decisions.
- Educational: Educational texts are designed to instruct or teach a particular subject or skill, typically with a clear learning objective.
- Explanatory: Explanatory texts clarify complex ideas, processes, or phenomena, breaking them down into simpler terms and making them easier to understand.
- Expressive: These texts express the author's emotions, feelings, thoughts, or personal experiences, often without a specific goal beyond self-expression, for instance, a personal diary or memoir, which could be perceived as fiction or non-fiction.
- Argumentative: Argumentative texts present a central claim or thesis and provide supporting evidence and reasoning to persuade the audience of the argument's validity.
- Instructive: Instructions, guides, and manuals fall under this category, with the primary purpose of guiding the reader on how to perform a task or use a product.
- Advisory: Advisory texts offer advice, recommendations, or suggestions, helping the audience make informed choices or decisions, such as providing a health and safety protocol.
- Critical: Critical texts involve analysing and evaluating the strengths and weaknesses of other texts, ideas, or concepts.
- Report: Reports are typically written to convey information on a particular subject, often structured and formal, to inform or document.
- Review: Reviews evaluate and critique various products, services, works of art, or other items, helping the audience make informed choices.
- Promotional: These texts aim to promote and sell products, services, or ideas, often using persuasive language and marketing strategies.
- Legal: Legal texts include contracts, statutes, and legal documents, which establish and enforce legal rights, obligations, and agreements.
- Historical: Historical texts recount events, people, and developments from the past, often to preserve and transmit historical knowledge but sometimes intending to give a specific view of events.
- News: News articles and reports aim to provide current information on events, issues, and developments worldwide.
There are further examples of texts and types of text, but these are some main types. Instantly, you will recognise that some of the differences in how things are written can stem from the different purposes of the text.
Some purposes will inform the way that the texts need to be written.
For instance, legal texts such as contracts need to be written with clarity and no actual room for interpretation.
Instructions such as manuals will be written in a way that uses simple language and aims to simplify the process.
Argumentative or persuasive texts usually use specific tools, such as the rule of three, to make the writing more effective.
The video below explains more examples of purpose and information on comparing texts.
Example: Review Text Extract
Let's take a quick look at an example of a review before a brief exercise for you to complete.
Ed Sheeran: Autumn Variations review – as flat and dull as a grey sky
Excerpt:
"England has to be one of the most mind-numbingly banal paeans poor old Blighty has ever been subject to. “I find this country of mine gets a bad reputation for being cold and grey,” croons Sheeran, an odd complaint considering he’s halfway through an overwhelmingly dreary catalogue of coastal sights: “broken glass and train lines”, the “pub with a flag that’s working flexible hours” (whatever that means) and “only one road sign, telling cars to slow down”.
Rachel Aroesti, The Guardian
The eye-watering obviousness doesn’t stop there. Of course it doesn’t: it’s Sheeran’s calling card. American Town – presumably about visiting his now-wife during her time living in New York – has the pair eating “Chinese food in small white boxes / Live the life we saw in Friends.” Autumn Variations is devoid of wit, although occasionally there is unintentional hilarity, as on the strained heartfelt ballad The Day I Was Born, which commemorates the tragedy of a man whose friends can’t be bothered to celebrate his January birthday. Worst of all, the album is littered with gibberish. “Saturday night is giving me a reason to rely on the strobe lights,” goes the refrain of Plastic Bag, about a disaffected man who lives for weekend partying. It’s enough to have you actively craving pop’s ChatGPT-abetted future."
Ask yourself the following questions:
- What is the reviewer trying to achieve?
- Why do they include quotes from the album?
- What are some of the more descriptive words they use to give their opinion on the album?
- Do they like the album?
Reviews serve an interesting purpose, and this is an example of an unfavourable review. What is its purpose? You may need to carry out similar exercises during your GCSE studies.
Audience
The same text above can also help with an exercise about the audience. To further your analysis, let's explore some questions that may teach you about the reviewer's audience.
Try to consider:
- Content. Who might be interested in the review?
- The type of language used, does it use slang, is it casual or unusual? Does it require specialist language?
- The tone
Consider whether the following statements are a reasonable explanation, and why?
"The reviewer is writing for an audience with a good understanding of language, using terms like "mind-numbingly banal paeans" in a critical way, and requiring a good grasp of English."
"The reviewer uses a conversational tone to appeal to the reader, even making jokes such as "It's enough to have you actively craving pop's ChatGPT-abetted future."
"The overall tone of the review is sneering and disapproving, using terms like "eye-watering obviousness" the reviewer shows that they don't enjoy or recommend the album."
Tone and Choice of Words
The audience heavily influences the tone of a piece, whether formal, informal, academic, conversational, or technical. For instance, a scientific research paper intended for experts in a field will use specialised terminology and a formal tone. At the same time, a blog post aimed at a general readership may adopt a more casual, accessible tone. The choice of language, including complexity and jargon, is adjusted to suit the audience's familiarity with the subject matter.
Relevance
The audience's interests, needs, and prior knowledge determine the content a writer includes in a piece. A writer needs to consider what the audience already knows and what they need to know. This influences the depth of explanation, the choice of examples, and the selection of supporting evidence. Writing for a specialised audience may allow for in-depth technical details, whereas writing for a broad audience may require simplified explanations.
In the case of the album review example, the writer is aiming his text at someone who has never heard the album to give them an idea of what it is like before they listen.
Structure
The text structure is interesting to consider, and it plays a big part in certain types of non-fiction. For example, a recipe will usually come as a list. Similarly, instructions will come in an order and with lots of white space to not confuse you. Reviews like this one have longer passages of text.
Conclusion
Understanding purpose and audience helps to give a better overall picture of non-fiction texts and why they are created in the way they are. You may need to analyse specific non-fiction texts throughout your GCSE, so practising is a good idea.
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Great site with a lot of resources. Thank You so much.
Hi Anneme! Thanks for your lovely comment, glad to hear that you found these resources useful! Best of luck with your revision! :)
thank you for helping me with my work
Wow. I can’t imagine what sources were used for this, but they clearly weren’t reliable. “During the first half of the twentieth century, America was open to immigrants from all parts of Europe”—nope. Look up the Immigration Act of 1924, and keep in mind it didn’t come out of nowhere. It wasn’t significantly revised until 1952 and was only replaced in 1965. It’s not exactly a secret Americans overall were distinctly unwelcoming toward Italian immigrants for quite some time. I’m not sure how many were victims of hate crimes in total, but not everyone murdered in the lynching epidemic was Black.
“However, Italian immigrants, especially from southern Italy or Sicily, held on to their ancient values”—don’t most of us do that? This smacks of xenophobia, and it gets worse from there. “Italy has a violent past due to criminal organizations like the Mafia…” I don’t even know where to start with this, but I see this is a UK site. Do you not realize how violent your own history is? Do you think Italians are monolithic? Even if your portrayal of the mafia’s significance were accurate, what makes a mafia don so different from one of the many capricious, overly entitled English monarchs throughout your history?
To be clear, I don’t want your answers to any of these questions. I want you to properly research your subjects before attempting to teach others about them.