Determining Your Purpose and Audience

Choosing a research question is very similar to what I just described above. You will usually have some idea of your topic; often it will be something assigned by a teacher. Keeping your topic in mind, determine your purpose.

For a research paper, your purpose will often be one of the following:

• Inform: When you write to inform, you are giving facts about a topic without including your own opinion
  or bias.
• Persuade: When you write to persuade, you use facts that lead the reader to agree with your opinions about the subject.
• Explain: Writing to explain is similar to writing to inform except that you are making complex information easier to understand. An example might be an article that compares studies about treatments for insomnia.
• Learn: When you write to learn, you are expanding your own knowledge of a topic. For example, if you are an avid gamer, you might want to write about video games as a treatment for ADHD for your psychology class.

You will also need to determine your audience. Sometimes your teacher will tell you who your audience is when the paper is assigned. If not, consider these questions when determining your audience: Who will be reading your writing? How familiar are they with your topic? What do you want them to learn about your topic? If you are writing to persuade, how easily will they be persuaded of your point of view?

Let’s use this lesson as an example. Read the questions below and select the best answer. Keep in mind a question may have more than one right answer. Click on the arrow to advance to the next question.

In this lesson, we will work through finding a research question together. Are you ready to begin? Below is an imaginary blackboard with your assignment written on it. Let’s read it together.

At first, this will seem like an intimidating project. Most likely, you’ve been assigned essay questions for the papers you’ve written in the past. Now it’s mostly up to you. Where do you start when you don’t have a detailed assignment?

Glad you asked! As I mentioned earlier, you should begin your reserach projects by deciding upon your purpose and your audience.

Audience

Let’s determine our audience first. You’re supposed to give an Earth Day presentation to the entire school. Let’s answer the questions from above to figure out who our audience is.

• Who will be reading your writing? The answer is ninth- to twelfth-grade students.
• How familiar are they with your topic? Some might be very familiar with the topic, but many probably won’t be. (This is why you’re being asked to present to the whole school.)
• What do you want them to learn about your topic? As we learn more about what we are going to write about, the answer to this question will become more specific. Right now, we want them to learn about protecting the environment.
• How easily will they be persuaded to your point of view? Probably pretty easily because most people care about protecting the environment from pollution. When your audience doesn’t know much about a topic, you are going to need to give them more background information than you would give someone who knows more or who is an expert on your topic.

Purpose

Let’s find out what Earth Day is so that we can determine our purpose. This will require a little research. According to the Environmental Encyclopedia, Earth Day is a day for learning more about how to protect the Earth from air, water, and soil pollution. Your purpose is to write a paper informing other students about protecting the environment. In the next section, we will discuss brainstorming so that you can take your broad purpose and turn it into a research topic.