As it is written, Common Core Standard #6 is perhaps the most
difficult for students to grasp, and for teachers to teach. The standard
asks students to “Assess how point of view or purpose shapes the content and
style of a text.” Again, this is a fairly significant shift from the old
way of teaching reading. At most, we might ask students to determine the
point of view or purpose of a text and provide evidence of that. In this
era, readers are expected to not only identify the point of view or purpose of
a text, but to explain how that point of view or purpose has shaped the text.
Like Standard #5, it asks readers to consider an author’s choices.
The difference is that for this standard, students have to explain an
author’s choices in relationship to their purpose, which is much more specific
than just their general choices.
For many texts, this will be difficult, largely because either the
purpose or point of view are difficult to determine or simply bland. I
mean, I hate to offend the science folk, but the text in the biology book does
not lend itself well to this type of analysis because its purpose is generally
transparent, and its voice is relatively non-descript.
So assuming that the text has a strong voice and or a nuanced
purpose, the next step would be to help students to first, identify the point
of view / purpose; and second, contemplate how that point of view / purpose
impacted the author’s choice for content and style.
There are a number of things that teachers can do to help students
determine the point of view or purpose of a text: consider
the title, consider the main idea of the text, look for the argument(s),
consider what details have not been included, look for word choices that might
indicate bias, and in some cases, look into the history of the author to
determine if she / he has taken a position on the subject in the past.
Once the point of view / purpose is determined, then students can
start to consider how that might have driven specific choices of the author--
in both what they chose to include in their text, and the words they chose to
use. Students could be prompted with questions like, “If the author’s
purpose is to X, then how does she / he structure the text to achieve that
purpose?” Have students consider the types of information the author
uses, the organization of the text, and even the word choices.
One possible way to get at this question is to work backward.
Ask students to consider an author choice for a moment. “Why do you
think the author did X?” And then, help them connect the dots to the
purpose of the text.
Analyzing author’s choices is generally tricky. At best, we
can only guess at their reasoning for any given choice (unless they explicitly
state their thinking).
This can make the discussion of their
motives messy and kind of fun, as long as students bring back their choices to
textual evidence. Getting students to think beyond the text in this way
will challenge them to look more deeply at the writing and how the author’s
choices reflect the purpose they had for writing it.
