Activities for Comparing and Contrasting Author’s Voice/Purpose

Today, we’re providing 4 activities for comparing and contrasting the author’s voice/purpose.

Authors write for various reasons. Depending on their topic, authors might be trying to convince a reader to do something or spread a message to a wider audience through their work.

No matter what their purpose is, part of our job as educators is to help students identify the author’s purpose, analyze an author’s voice, and figure out why the author is trying to share that information with us.

The author’s purpose varies depending on the type of text being written.

Sometimes, an author is trying to entertain, persuade, or provide information on a topic. Other times, an author is not talking about a specific topic but rather trying to open our eyes to a specific theme or cultural issue that they want to address.

Often, students think that all literature, whether it is a poem, a piece of music, a book, an article in a newspaper, or even a blog post, is simply meant to entertain people and is up to the interpretation of the audience member,  but that is rarely the case.

Instead, most pieces of literature are written with a specific intent or purpose in mind, and we must be detectives as we try to figure out what hidden information, or sometimes even completely obvious information, the author is trying to share with us.

Today, we will explore activities for comparing and contrasting an author’s voice/purpose and provide different directions you can take as you work through this skill with your middle school ELA students.

4 Activities for Comparing and Contrasting Author’s Voice/Purpose

Activity #1 | Paired Passages

One direction I like to go when working with an author’s voice or an author’s purpose is to use paired passages written by the same person.  In The Sparkly Notebook Store, we have dozens of paired passages written by the same person on a variety of topics. Any one of these paired passage resources could be used as a way for students to analyze an author’s voice on a particular topic.

In addition to the passage being written by the same person, each paired passage set focuses both passages on the same topic. This opens up conversations for students to discuss the different ways that the author is framing the information in order to have a specific intent or purpose.

Students can use these passages to discuss and/or write about how the author uses the information, word choice, or examples to make their point.

Activity #2 | Informational Texts vs. Literature Texts

Another way to approach activities for comparing and contrasting authors’ voices/purposes is to break down how this looks different depending on whether the text is informational or literature-based. 

One of the best ways to broach this topic is to look at the way the standards for the author’s voice/purpose are written.

For each of these standards, we have developed a full unit study that teachers can use as they work through the author’s voice and the author’s purpose with their students. These units are fully built out and grade-level appropriate, so students can learn, review, and be assessed on the author’s intent, whether it is in the context of an informational text or a literature-based text. Click on the images below to learn more about each standard-based unit.

Activity #3 | Author’s Purpose Similar Topics

Another activity you can try when working with an author’s purpose is to examine different authors’ purposes across a similar topic. 

An easy way to do this in modern times is to look at blog posts. Pull four blog posts on the same topic, all with different authors. 

Give students some time to read each, discuss what information is included in each, discuss what information is not included in each, and then spend some time discussing why the author may or may not have included the information they did. What was the author’s goal with this blog post? What was their purpose?

Another way to do the same activity is to look at news outlets covering the same major event. Choose an event that students would have some interest in. For example, you could choose an event that is taking place in sports, the Olympics, politics, or even music or gaming. Give students time to review the text or news reports and discuss how the author’s intent or purpose affected the way that the information was presented. 

Activity #4 | Same Author Different Texts

The last of our activities for comparing and contrasting an author’s voice/purpose involves looking at how the same author writes within different contexts. This can include reading two novels by the same author, two blog posts by the same author, or any other type of text in which the author writes about two different topics entirely.

Does the author have a way of writing that is consistent across the different topics? 

Do they have a specific type of topic that they prefer to write about? 

How does their intent or purpose change with the topic they are writing on?

Do they tend to write on the same themes or with the same amount of passion, no matter the topic?

The more students can understand how an author’s purpose can change the interpretation of a text, the less likely they are to be easily swayed by a singular interpretation of an event. 

Likewise, they will also begin to understand that words are rarely just words. Words are often filled with nuance and meaning, and it takes a skilled eye to truly understand the message that someone is trying to spread through their writing.

Hopefully, these activities for comparing and contrasting authors’ voices/purposes will inspire you to approach this topic with an open mind and creativity!