Purpose is the reason to why a writer wrote or spoke.
I came to realize that the concept of having a purpose is one of the most important aspects of writing compared to the other types of rhetoric. This is because purpose gives the author the ‘why’ when writing and gives the audience a reason for reading what was created.
Purpose was not necessarily a concept that was introduced in this class, rather it was an idea that had been developing my whole academic career. I was always expected to use purpose when coming up with a prompt for a variety of assignments.
For the most part, coming up with the purpose for all of the assignments were rather easy, as I was always conditioned to do so. Each assignment required to come up with a topic, and each topic came with a purpose almost automatically.
“My purpose is to inform the president of the issues that arise from the lack of advisors and provide several solutions that would be most beneficial for the school and the students.”
The quotation above was taken from the reflection paper from my memo assignment where I was stating what the purpose of the letter was towards the President of the College. When I was able to identify what the topic of my memo would be, which was addressing the lack of advisors in CCNY, I was quickly able to plug that in to come up with the purpose, which is to INFORM. Purpose could take many forms but for this memo, it was to create awareness for an issue within the college.
Going through this class definitely helped me refine the concept of purpose even more. For the future, I intend to continue to use purpose when identifying rhetorics for papers and writing my own.
