6.2 Identifying Author's Purpose, Tone, and Point of View
Key Takeaways
- An author's purpose falls into four fundamental categories—to inform, to persuade, to entertain, or to describe—with healthcare passages frequently blending factual exposition with persuasive clinical advocacy.
- Tone represents the author's underlying emotional disposition and intellectual posture toward the subject, conveyed through specific diction, syntactic complexity, and qualifying adjectives.
- Point of view reflects the narrator's perceptual stance: first-person signifies personal clinical reflection, second-person establishes direct instructional directives, and third-person objective maintains clinical neutrality.
- Analyzing an author's target audience and professional credentials provides essential context for evaluating the depth, formality, and persuasive intent of healthcare literature.
6.2 Identifying Author's Purpose, Tone, and Point of View
Quick Answer: On the ATI TEAS 7, uncovering author's purpose requires determining whether the primary intent is to inform/expose (deliver neutral facts and data), persuade/argue (advocate for a stance or action), entertain (evoke emotional/aesthetic interest), or describe (paint a sensory or spatial picture). Tone reveals the author's intellectual attitude and emotional temperature (e.g., clinical, objective, skeptical, urgent, empathetic, didactic), deduced from word choice (diction) and sentence structure (syntax). Point of View identifies the narrator's lens: first-person (personal experience), second-person (direct instructions/commands), or third-person objective (scientific neutrality).
The Four Core Informational Purposes
Every published text is crafted with a primary communicative intention. On the TEAS Reading section, determining author's purpose is not a guessing game; it is an evidence-based deduction derived from passage structure, diction, and thesis placement.
1. To Inform / Expose (Expository Writing)
The author's goal is to educate the reader, clarify a complex concept, or present verifiable facts without advocating for a particular agenda or attempting to alter the reader's beliefs.
- Textual Characteristics: Heavy reliance on empirical data, peer-reviewed citations, neutral definitions, and balanced overviews. Diction is devoid of emotional superlatives.
- Healthcare Context: Pathophysiology textbooks, laboratory reference manuals, clinical drug monographs, and factual descriptions of disease etiology.
- Key Indicators: Third-person objective point of view, precise scientific nomenclature, absence of moralizing language.
2. To Persuade / Argue (Persuasive Writing)
The author aims to convince the reader to adopt a specific viewpoint, support a policy reform, alter a clinical behavior, or reject an opposing claim.
- Textual Characteristics: The presence of a clear thesis asserting what should, must, or ought to occur. The author pairs factual evidence with rhetorical appeals (appeals to safety, professional ethics, cost efficacy, or patient well-being).
- Healthcare Context: Hospital policy editorials, public health advocacy campaigns, opinion columns urging legislative nurse-to-patient staffing caps, or arguments championing needle-exchange programs.
- Key Indicators: Loaded modifiers ("unacceptable delay," "vital imperative," "compelling evidence"), modal verbs (must, should, urgent), and direct calls to action.
3. To Entertain (Narrative and Reflective Writing)
The author seeks to engage the reader emotionally, provide dramatic narrative tension, or evoke aesthetic enjoyment.
- Textual Characteristics: Expressive language, vivid character development, dialogue, sensory imagery, humor, irony, or personal emotional vulnerability.
- Healthcare Context: Memoirs of trauma surgeons, personal reflections of hospice nurses, historical narratives detailing dramatic medical discoveries, or humorous reflections on clinical rotations.
- Key Indicators: First-person narration, chronological storytelling, focus on subjective feelings and sensory impressions rather than clinical statistics.
4. To Describe (Descriptive Writing)
The author aims to construct a vivid sensory, physical, or anatomical visualization of an object, patient condition, setting, or physiological structure.
- Textual Characteristics: Highly specific sensory adjectives, spatial transitions, and meticulous physical detail without persuasive argumentation.
- Healthcare Context: Clinical descriptions of dermatological lesions (e.g., assessing borders, color variegation, and diameter in melanoma), surgical operative field reports, or anatomical dissections.
- Key Indicators: Spatial prepositions ("inferior to," "circumscribed by"), vivid sensory adjectives (erythematous, indurated, fluctuant, glistening).
Analyzing Mixed or Dual Rhetorical Purposes
Real-world healthcare writing frequently balances dual purposes. An author may spend four paragraphs providing meticulous epidemiological statistics (informing) to establish the factual foundation for an urgent policy recommendation in the final paragraph (persuading).
When faced with a passage that appears both informative and persuasive, ask yourself:
- The "So What?" Test: Why did the author compile this information? Is the author satisfied with simply presenting the data, or is the data weaponized to prove that a current practice is dangerous or deficient?
- Primary vs. Secondary Purpose: The secondary purpose may be educational (informing), but the primary purpose is persuasive if the passage culminates in an explicit or implicit call to action.
Determining Point of View (POV)
Point of view indicates the perspective from which the text is communicated. In healthcare reading, point of view establishes the relationship between author, subject, and reader:
| Point of View | Pronouns Utilized | Primary Communicative Function | Healthcare Application Example |
|---|---|---|---|
| First Person | I, me, my, we, us, our | Relays personal experiences, clinical reflections, or collaborative research teams | "In our clinical audit of surgical site infections, we observed that pre-operative chlorhexidine bathing..." |
| Second Person | You, your, yourself (often implied imperative) | Issues direct commands, operational instructions, or patient education | "Before administering the morning insulin dose, verify your blood glucose reading using the fingerstick monitor." |
| Third Person Objective | He, she, it, they, the clinician, researchers | Delivers neutral, impersonal analysis without revealing author feelings or internal thoughts | "The patient presented with a blood pressure of 168/94 mmHg and exhibited bilateral lower extremity pitting edema." |
| Third Person Omniscient | He, she, they (with insight into multiple minds) | Omnisciently details the feelings, motives, and internal thoughts of multiple participants | "While the physician felt confident in the novel diagnostic protocol, the scrub nurse secretly worried about the delay." |
This table describes narrative point of view. TEAS questions on objective R.2.4 more often ask about the author's perspective—the stance the author takes on the topic. Section 6.3 covers that skill.
Decoding Tone: The Linguistic Anatomy of Attitude
Tone is the author's emotional attitude toward the topic or the audience. Unlike author's purpose (which is what the author wants to accomplish), tone is how the author sounds.
Tone is communicated through two linguistic pillars:
- Diction (Word Choice): Are words neutral and technical, or emotionally loaded? Compare the neutral phrase "patient non-adherence" with the pejorative phrase "willful non-compliance."
- Syntax (Sentence Architecture): Are sentences short, punchy, and urgent? Or are they complex, measured, and academic with extensive qualifying clauses?
Common Healthcare Tones on the TEAS
- Objective / Clinical: Impartial, dispassionate, evidence-based, devoid of personal judgment ("The randomized controlled trial enrolled 450 subjects across six medical centers...").
- Urgent / Imperative: Emphatic, calling for immediate intervention, highlighting severe risks ("Unless immediate countermeasures are implemented, catastrophic mortality rates will overwhelm the regional trauma network...").
- Skeptical / Guarded: Cautious, questioning assumptions, emphasizing study limitations ("While preliminary in vitro findings appear promising, these unverified claims warrant severe scrutiny and rigorous replication...").
- Empathetic / Compassionate: Warm, humane, validating emotional suffering ("Navigating a new diagnosis of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis places an unimaginable psychological and logistical burden on families...").
- Didactic / Instructive: Educational, patronizing or instructional, explaining step-by-step principles ("To ensure medication safety, the nurse must always confirm the five rights: right patient, right drug, right route, right dose, and right time...").
- Satirical / Critical: Irony or sharp mockery aimed at exposing folly or institutional absurdity ("Bureaucratic hospital committees have successfully added seven new mandatory forms, ensuring clinicians spend more time clicking boxes than speaking to patients.").
Evaluating Target Audience and Author Credentials
Analyzing who the text was written for clarifies its purpose and tone:
- Professional / Specialized Audience: Characterized by advanced medical jargon (e.g., "ischemic penumbra," "hypercapnic respiratory failure"), assumed clinical baseline knowledge, and formal third-person syntax. Target: Nurses, physicians, pharmacists.
- Patient / General Public Audience: Characterized by plain language, relatable analogies, definitions of medical terminology, and second-person engagement. Target: Newly diagnosed patients, family caregivers.
- Policymakers / Administrators: Focuses on fiscal metrics, regulatory compliance, legal liability, and population health outcomes.
Author credentials further inform reliability: an editorial authored by the Director of the CDC carries institutional authority, whereas a sponsored blog post by a supplement manufacturer suggests commercial self-interest.
Comparative Healthcare Excerpts: Same Topic, Contrasting Tones
To master tone and purpose detection, analyze these two excerpts addressing the exact same subject: Artificial Intelligence in Diagnostic Radiology.
Excerpt A: Objective & Informative
Deep-learning convolutional neural networks (CNNs) were trained on a dataset of 112,120 frontal chest radiographs to detect pulmonary nodules. When tested against an independent validation cohort of 2,400 radiographs evaluated by a consensus panel of three board-certified thoracic radiologists, the algorithm demonstrated an area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUC) of 0.942 (95% CI: 0.928–0.956), with a sensitivity of 89.4% and a specificity of 88.1%. Minor false-positive classifications were observed primarily in cases with underlying pleural thickening or calcified granulomas. These quantitative outcomes suggest that automated diagnostic models can achieve diagnostic parity with subspecialty clinicians in controlled radiographic screening environments.
- Author's Purpose: To inform. The passage presents statistical performance metrics (AUC, sensitivity, specificity) without urging adoption or expressing subjective enthusiasm.
- Tone: Clinical, objective, and analytical.
- Diction & Syntax: Highly specialized ("convolutional neural networks," "receiver operating characteristic curve," "calcified granulomas"), complex passive-voice constructions, precise quantitative margins.
- Point of View: Third-person objective.
Excerpt B: Urgent & Persuasive
Despite Silicon Valley’s reckless promises that artificial intelligence will instantaneously replace radiologists, the uncritical deployment of diagnostic algorithms across overburdened emergency departments represents a perilous gamble with human lives. Proprietary algorithms operating as opaque 'black boxes' routinely miss subtle, life-threatening tension pneumothoraces while spewing countless phantom anomalies that bury clinicians in unnecessary confirmatory testing. Healthcare executives who rush to adopt these untested systems to slash radiologist staffing costs are prioritizing corporate profit margins over foundational patient safety. Regulators and clinical leaders must immediately halt widespread commercial implementation until these algorithms undergo independent clinical auditing under real-world hospital conditions.
- Author's Purpose: To persuade and warn. The author argues passionately that AI deployment must be halted until rigorous independent safety audits occur.
- Tone: Urgent, impassioned, and critical/alarmed.
- Diction & Syntax: Loaded, emotive language ("reckless promises," "uncritical deployment," "perilous gamble," "spewing countless phantom anomalies," "slash radiologist staffing"), imperative command structure ("must immediately halt").
- Point of View: Third-person with strong rhetorical advocacy.
Reference Table: Healthcare Tones and Diction Indicators
| Tone Category | Defining Attitude | Typical Diction Indicators | Syntactic Characteristics | Illustrative Clinical Example |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Objective / Clinical | Unbiased, neutral, evidence-centered | Demonstrated, measured, observed, statistically significant, cohort, parameters | Passive voice, complex compound sentences, precise numerical data | "Serum troponin I levels peaked at 4.2 ng/mL twelve hours post-infarction." |
| Urgent / Imperative | Alarmed, pressing, action-demanding | Imperative, critical, perilous, catastrophic, immediate, without delay, vital | Short declarative sentences, imperative verbs, emphatic exclamation | "Immediate surgical decompression is vital; every minute of delay increases irreversible ischemia." |
| Skeptical / Guarded | Doubtful, scrutinizing, questioning | Purported, questionable, unverified, preliminary, warrants scrutiny, inconclusive | Qualifying modal auxiliaries (may, might, appears), contrast clauses | "The vendor's purported cure rate is questionable given the small, unblinded sample size." |
| Empathetic / Compassionate | Understanding, humane, emotionally attuned | Distressing, vulnerable, supportive, dignity, profound suffering, holistic | Warm descriptive adjectives, focus on patient subjective experience | "Preserving patient dignity and easing psychological distress remain the core of palliative care." |
| Didactic / Instructive | Instructive, educational, rule-bound | Ensure, systematically, fundamental, principle, standard protocol, verify | Direct imperative steps, structured bulleting, second-person address | "Always verify two patient identifiers before administering any medication." |
| Satirical / Critical | Derisive, mocking institutional absurdity | Farce, ironic, corporate theater, superficial, baffling bureaucratic decrees | Sarcasm, exaggerated rhetorical questions, contrasting reality with rhetoric | "Hospital management solved nursing burnout by offering a mandatory thirty-minute webinar on resilience." |
Read the following excerpt from a nursing leadership journal: 'Hospital administrators must recognize that severe nurse understaffing is not merely a budgetary inconvenience; it is a direct driver of preventable patient mortality. When nurse-to-patient ratios exceed safe thresholds, medication errors skyrocket and failure-to-rescue rates surge precipitously. State legislatures must urgently intervene by establishing legally binding staffing mandates to safeguard both clinical staff and vulnerable patients.' What is the author's primary purpose in this excerpt?
An investigator reviews a newly marketed nutritional compound claimed to reverse cognitive decline: 'Although the commercial developer claims their herbal extract restores memory function, their published evidence rests entirely on an unblinded trial of twelve subjects without a placebo control group. Until large-scale, double-blind, randomized controlled trials are completed and replicated by independent laboratories, clinicians should treat these therapeutic claims with extreme reservations.' Which tone best characterizes the author's voice?
A printed document begins: 'Welcome to your post-operative recovery guide. During your first 48 hours at home, you must keep your surgical incision completely clean and dry. Check your temperature twice daily using an oral thermometer, and contact the triage nurse immediately if your reading exceeds 101 degrees Fahrenheit or if you notice spreading redness around the sutures.' Which combination accurately identifies the point of view and intended target audience of this text?