1. Nonfiction Articles
Author’s purpose, supporting ideas, scope, summarizing, and synthesizing

2. Persuade you to do/believe something
Author’s Purpose
Finding the author’s purpose is as easy a P.I.E.
The “author’s purpose” is just code-word for why the author wrote it.
The author’s purpose will be one of the following:
Persuade you to do/believe something
Inform you about a subject or issue
Entertain you with a story

3. Author’s Purpose: Persuade
The author tries to get you to do something or believe in something that they say.
They will use argumentative techniques, like ethos/logos/pathos or bandwagon appeal.
Examples:
Advertisements
Political ads or pamphlets
Opinion articles
Your research papers!

4. Author’s Purpose: Inform
The author is writing to inform you; they will give facts, information, or directions.
Examples:
Newspaper articles or news stories
How-To essays
Recipes, driving directions, installation directions
Nonfiction such as biographies or histories

5. Author’s Purpose: Entertain
The author is telling a story for our enjoyment.
The story might not be completely happy or funny – it can have all emotions.
Examples:
Fiction books (The Outsiders, Five People)
Nonfiction such as memoirs or anecdotes
Myths or fables
Short stories

6. What is the author’s purpose?

7. Supporting Ideas
As we saw in our research unit, when writing, you have a main topic or thesis statement.
Any ideas, examples, details, reasons, and explanations you use to further explain your topic/thesis are called supporting ideas or details.
For example, take this thesis statement:
Schools should not require students to wear uniforms because they limit student creativity, are expensive, and do not fit all body types.

8. Supporting Ideas
Schools should not require students to wear uniforms because they limit student creativity, are expensive, and do not fit all body types.
These three reasons (in color) all further explain why I think schools should not require uniforms – so, they are supporting ideas.
When I write more about each of these ideas, I may include specific details or examples. These are supporting ideas as well.
Recall some supporting ideas you included in your research essay.

9. Scope
Simply put, scope just means: the amount of content or information that the article (or a book or essay) covers.
The scope of an article can be narrow or wide.
For example, if I am writing an article about birds, I could keep my scope more narrow and write about specific aspects of “bird information”:
A specific type of bird, such as robins
Types of birds that cannot fly
How birds’ hollow bones help them fly

10. Scope
Or, I could keep my scope wider, and just inform you about birds in general.
The more specific an article is about its subject, the smaller the scope.

11. Summarizing
Summarizing is easy, and you probably do it every day! Think about when your best friend asks you about the movie you watched Friday night…
Summarizing (in our case) is when you tell about the information of an article in your own words. Summaries are meant to be shorter than the actual article or book, so they only give the most important information.
Quick! Summarize The Outsiders for me!

12. Summarizing
When writing a summary, you should keep your writing objective. This means that you do not insert your own feelings or opinions about what you have read. You only re-tell the information that is in the article.

13. Summarizing
To summarize well, you need to first read an article thoroughly. Then, you should identify the main idea of the article: what is the article telling you?
Then, pick out the most important facts or points.
Re-tell the main idea and important facts in your own words.

14. Synthesizing
Synthesizing is a lot like summarizing, except you are putting the ideas of two or more articles or sources together to create one piece of writing.
Think about this like making a cake: you have the mix and the eggs. These are two very different things, but when you put them together and bake it, voila! You have a cake. This cake looks nothing like the eggs nor the mix. It is a new product.

15. Synthesizing
To synthesize, you need to read and understand the main ideas and important facts of two or more sources (like articles or books) with similar topics. This step is similar to what we do with summarizing.
However, instead of writing two summaries for each source, you put the ideas you gathered from each together and write one product to tell what you gathered from each.
When you wrote your research paper, you synthesized the information you got from many sources to create a whole new product: your essay!

16. Review & Practice
Author’s purpose = why the author wrote the article. Remember P.I.E
Supporting Idea = explanations, reasons, examples that further explain a thesis or main idea of an article.
Scope = the amount of information covered in an article. What the article is specifically about.
Summarizing = Retelling the important points of an article in your own words but NOT with your own opinions.
Synthesizing = Using information from two or more sources in a new piece of writing (paragraph, essay, etc.)