English Language Arts and Reading.2.10.C

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The student is expected to

discuss the author's use of print and graphic features to achieve specific purposes;

author's purpose strand teks talk image

Knowledge and Skills Statement

Author's purpose and craft: listening, speaking, reading, writing, and thinking using multiple texts. The student uses critical inquiry to analyze the authors' choices and how they influence and communicate meaning within a variety of texts. The student analyzes and applies author's craft purposefully in order to develop his or her own products and performances.

Use a checklist to monitor which students have mastered the SE and which students need more support. A checklist might have students’ names down the side and the types of print and graphic features across the top. Some text features to highlight include table of contents, glossary, index, headings, subheadings, bold or italicized words, pictures, diagrams, graphs, and charts. While reading a text in a whole-group or small-group context, ask students why they think the author included certain pieces of the text or graphics.


Examples:

  • What is the purpose of the table of contents?
  • What is the purpose of the glossary?
  • Why are certain words bold in the text? How can you figure out what that word means? (context clues and glossary)
  • Do you see any diagrams or captions on this page? Why did the author do that? How does this help the reader?
  • What type of print and graphic features do you notice that tell you the genre of this text?
Print and graphic features are parts of a text that draw the reader's attention to important information. Print features are the use of words to explain something in the text (e.g., titles, bold and italicized font, headings, subheadings, captions, glossary, index, table of contents). Graphic features are pictures, visual aids, or other images within a text used to support the author’s purpose and message (e.g. graphs, diagrams, charts, timelines, bullet points).