Lesson 1.3 · Unit 1 · CED skill 1.A
Purpose and message: what the writer wants this audience to do
Weak analysis collapses three things into one. The subject is what a text is about. The message is the claim it delivers about that subject. The purpose is the effect the writer wants on a particular audience, and purpose is the only one of the three that changes when the audience changes.
- RHS-1.C. The purpose of a text is what the writer hopes to accomplish with it. Writers may have more than one purpose in a text.
- Subject: the matter under discussion.
- Message: the claim delivered about it, writable as one sentence.
- Purpose: the effect sought on this audience: to authorize, to reassure, to refuse, to recruit.
- Purpose is audience-bound: one message can serve different purposes in front of different readers.
- The test: ask what changes if the audience accepts the message. That answer is the purpose.
Source: Thomas Jefferson, letter to the Danbury Baptist Association, Washington, January 1, 1802.
Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between man and his God, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legislative powers of government reach actions only, and not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should “make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,” thus building a wall of separation between Church and State.
Rhetorical situation (SOAPS): Speaker, a president a year into office and publicly accused by New England Federalists of irreligion. Occasion, a letter of support from a Baptist minority in Connecticut, where Congregationalism was the established church. Audience, that association and, since Jefferson expected the reply to be printed, everyone else. Purpose: to explain why he issues no religious proclamations, without conceding indifference.
Exam tip: state a purpose as a verb with an object, “to authorize his refusal,” not “to inform the reader.” Informing is almost never the purpose of an argument.
Jefferson never names the thing he is declining to do, and that omission is the strategy. He reports contemplating “with sovereign reverence” an act “of the whole American people,” which moves a personal policy onto national authority and stages the reverence his critics said he lacked in the very act of refusing. The metaphor of a “wall” completes it: a wall is something a president may maintain but has no standing to move. A choice arrives sounding like a duty.
A text can have more than one purpose. Jefferson's reply serves at least two: to reassure a religious minority that the government is on its side, and to explain to the wider public he expected to read it why a president issues no religious proclamations. When you name a purpose on the exam, check whether a second one is working at the same time, and say which one controls the choice you are analyzing.
Write one paragraph distinguishing Jefferson's message from his purpose. Quote no more than six words, and explain what the wall image does for a president accused of irreligion.
Show a model paragraph
Jefferson's message is that government reaches “actions only, and not opinions”; his purpose is to make his own silence on fast days look obligatory rather than cold. The wall does that. A wall is built by someone else and inherited, so a president who issues no proclamation is not expressing a preference but declining to breach a structure “the whole American people” put up. To Baptists under an established church the image promises protection; to Federalists reading it in print it makes his restraint indistinguishable from constitutional duty.
Why it scores: it separates message from purpose, quotes short, and explains how one image works on two audiences at once.