Module 1: Define Your Topic, Define the Purpose (2 pages 1, 2) what's this?
| Consider the Rhetorical Situation | Generate and Refine Ideas | Define the Purpose | Consider the Audience | Develop a Tentative Thesis Statement |
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An important part of refining your topic involves
considering your purpose and audience and understanding how your
purpose and audience relate. Once
you clearly understand your purpose and audience, you can begin to
develop a tentative thesis. Think about the different kinds of writing that you have experiences with every day. |
Consider the newspaper that’s delivered to your door or that you read online. Its different parts do different things—they have different purposes. Its news articles and bulletin boards generally inform you about world, state, or local events; its opinion columns and advertisements try to persuade you either to a point of view or to buy something; its humor columns and comics attempt to entertain you. Since writing can have so many purposes, you have to decide exactly what you want your writing to do. What you want your writing to do will be tempered by your audience, but, for now, let’s consider purpose by itself.
Since
you have a topic, you already know what you want to write about.
But, your writing also needs to do or to accomplish
something.
Another
way of thinking about purpose is to think about your topic as a noun and
your purpose as a verb. Let’s
consider an example: your topic is the rise in the sea level of Long Beach
Island due to the green house effect.
This noun phrase reflects the topic for your paper, but it
doesn’t tell anything about what you want to accomplish in your
paper. So, to have a purpose,
you have to answer the question, “what do I want to accomplish in
my research paper?”
If
we return to our example, you’ll notice you need a verb or verb phrase
to accomplish something in your paper about the rise in the sea level of
Long Beach Island due to the green house effect.
More than one verb phrase is possible that would relate to this
topic. For example, you may
want to
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Describe the affects of the rise in the sea level of Long Beach Island on the Long Beach Island community
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Persuade readers to prevent the rise in the sea level by raising the island.
You may have more than one purpose in your paper, but typically you will be driven by a primary aim. For example, you may have to inform readers of the dangers of the rise in sea level to persuade readers to raise the island, but your main aim is still persuasive because your ultimate goal is to persuade, informing your readers is just one of the techniques you are using to attain your goal.
Now, let’s get back to the research paper you’re working on.
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Copyright 2003 by the Academic Center, the University of Houston-Victoria, and
Summer Leibensperger.
Created 2003 by Summer Leibensperger.
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