1. Reading Street Comprehension Skills: Author’s Purpose
Grades 4 and 5

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Author’s Purpose
Student Expectations
Students preview a text to predict what it is about.
Students identify whether the author’s main purpose is to persuade, to inform, to entertain, or to express something.
Students choose a reading rate based on the author’s purpose.
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Author’s Purpose
Why did the author write this piece? How can you tell?
How does figuring out the author’s purpose, or reason for writing, help you decide how to read the text?
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Author’s Purpose
What do you know about author’s purpose?
Let’s look at some important terms that will help us understand author’s purpose: persuade, inform, entertain, express
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Author’s Purpose
An author may write to persuade, to inform, to entertain, or to express something.
You can infer an author’s purpose from the text features and specific language the author chose.
An important reason for identifying author’s purpose is to adjust your rate of reading.
An author may have more than one purpose for writing. Example: A nonfiction story can be entertaining and informative! The purpose in a fiction story may be to inform or persuade, as well as to entertain!
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Author’s Purpose
You can predict an author’s purpose by previewing the text and can choose to adjust your rate of reading based on the purpose.
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Author’s Purpose
Let’s decide what the author’s purpose was for our selection this week.
What evidence do you have to support this?
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