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Author's Purpose: Persuade, Inform, Entertain
The PIE Framework for Reading
Authors write for different reasons, and understanding those reasons helps students become stronger readers. One common way to remember the main purposes is the PIE framework: Persuade, Inform, and Entertain. When readers know an author's purpose, they can better understand the message, tone, and type of text they are reading. This skill is useful for schoolwork, media literacy, and everyday reading.
The PIE framework helps students look for clues in the words, structure, and examples in a text. A persuasive text tries to change your mind or get you to act, an informative text teaches facts, and an entertaining text tells a story or amuses the reader. Readers can identify the purpose by noticing signal words, the kind of details included, and how the text makes them feel. Sometimes a text has more than one purpose, but usually one main purpose stands out the most.
Key Facts
- PIE stands for Persuade, Inform, Entertain.
- Persuade means the author wants the reader to believe something or do something.
- Inform means the author wants to teach the reader facts, details, or explanations.
- Entertain means the author wants to amuse the reader or tell an enjoyable story.
- Persuade clues: opinion words, reasons, strong feelings, calls to action such as buy, vote, try, or should.
- Inform clues: facts, dates, definitions, headings, examples, and explanations. Entertain clues: characters, plot, dialogue, humor, suspense, or imaginative details.
Vocabulary
- Author's Purpose
- The main reason an author writes a text.
- Persuade
- To try to convince the reader to think, feel, or do something.
- Inform
- To give the reader facts, explanations, or true information.
- Entertain
- To amuse the reader or tell a story that is enjoyable to read.
- Signal Words
- Words or phrases that give clues about the author's purpose.
Common Mistakes to Avoid
- Thinking every nonfiction text is only to inform, which is wrong because ads, speeches, and opinion articles are nonfiction but often try to persuade.
- Choosing entertain just because a text is fun to read, which is wrong because a text can be interesting and still mainly teach facts.
- Ignoring signal words like should, best, facts, or once upon a time, which is wrong because these clues often reveal the author's main purpose.
- Picking more than one purpose without deciding the main one, which is wrong because most classroom questions ask for the strongest or primary purpose.
Practice Questions
- 1 A poster says, Join the school recycling team today. It gives three reasons recycling helps the planet and tells students to sign up after lunch. What is the author's purpose, and what words helped you decide?
- 2 A magazine article explains how volcanoes form, includes labeled diagrams, and gives facts about eruptions in 1980 and 2022. What is the author's purpose, and list two clues from the description?
- 3 A short story has characters, dialogue, and a funny ending, but it also teaches a lesson about honesty. Which purpose is most likely the main one, and why?