JentooACT®

ACT® · Reading — Craft and Structure: Purpose and Point of View

Recognizing a Clear Authorial or Narratorial Intent

Authorial intent is the job a passage is doing, not its topic. Naming the verb behind it, argue, describe, trace, correct, refute, tells you how to read every sentence that follows.

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Every passage has a subject and a job. The subject is what it talks about. The job is what it's doing with that subject, and that job is the intent. A passage can describe apple varieties, or it can use apple varieties to defend the idea that useless-looking things deserve keeping. Same subject, different intent. Once you name the job, you know what to expect from the rest of the passage, and questions about structure, tone, and word choice get easier because you're reading for a purpose instead of just absorbing facts.

The verbs matter because they name distinct jobs. To describe is to lay out what something is, with no argument to defend. To trace is to follow a sequence, usually a change over time. To argue is to take a side and support it. To refute or correct is to take an existing claim and replace it with a better one, which is different from simply describing the truth: correction only makes sense against a backdrop of error. A passage that lists common myths and knocks each one down is correcting, not describing, because its structure depends on something wrong that it is actively fixing.

This topic sits next to point of view because intent and camera position work together. Knowing the job a text does helps you notice whose voice is doing the telling and what that voice leaves out or favors. A passage correcting myths speaks from outside the myth, with authority. A passage explaining neglect of a cheap fix speaks from curiosity about people's behavior, not judgment of the fix itself. Spot the job, and the bias underneath it gets easier to name too.

Key terms

Authorial intent
The job a piece of writing is doing with its subject, such as arguing, describing, tracing, or correcting.
Point of view
The position and attitude from which the narrator or author presents information.
Refute/correct
To replace a commonly held but wrong claim with a more accurate one, which requires an error to push against.
Trace
To follow how something changed or developed across a sequence or over time.
Subject vs. intent
The subject is what a text is about; the intent is what the text is doing with that subject.

Watch it explained

  1. How it worksHow do verbs like argue, describe, trace and refute name four different jobs a text can have?
  2. Worked exampleShow me naming the intent of a text that lists five myths and corrects each one in turn.
  3. Common mistakeWhy isn't a text's subject the same as its author's intent?

Check yourself

Your turneasy1 of 3
Informational passage: The 7 things everyone knows about the Bayeux Tapestry are mostly untrue. It is among the most reproduced objects in Europe and among the least accurately described. It is not a tapestry but an embroidery; it was probably made in England rather than Normandy; the 69 metres that survive are not the whole of it, since the end is missing; and the figure with the arrow in his eye is not certainly Harold. Each of these was settled by 1988, and each is still printed in guidebooks sold at the door. The author's intent in the passage is best described as an intent to:

End of topic.

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