MYP English Lang & Lit Author Intention Notes

How Can Intention Be Inferred From Choices?

1. A strong interpretation connects intention to craft.
2. By now it should be clear the only question you should start with is: what choices did the writer make, and what do those choices do to a reader?

The "choice → effect → purpose" chain

1. A reliable method is to build a chain of reasoning:
   1. Choice: Identify a specific feature (a word, an image, a perspective, a structural decision).
   2. Effect: Explain the likely effect on an audience (shock, empathy, distrust, admiration, discomfort).
   3. Purpose/Intention: Suggest what the writer might be trying to achieve by creating that effect (to criticize, to humanize, to persuade, to protest, to complicate).
2. This method mirrors the way you justify intention in many tasks you do outside of English, like writing a rationale about your own work: you explain what techniques you used and what you wanted them to do to a reader.

How Is Narrative Perspective A Major Tool For Shaping Intention?

One of the clearest ways to see intention is through narrative perspective, meaning the viewpoint from which a story is told.

First-person narration builds empathy

1. A writer may choose first-person narration to create closeness and empathy.
2. When a narrator speaks as "I," readers often experience events through that person's perceptions and emotions.
3. In a story featuring a disabled first-person narrator, readers can be guided to notice how other characters respond, and how those responses may be driven by inaccurate assumptions.
4. If the same events were narrated by a passer-by, the audience might never fully feel the gap between how the narrator sees herself and how others label her.

Shifting perspective reveals social assumptions

1. When you rewrite or imagine a scene from a different character's viewpoint (for example, a shopper, parent, elderly person, or child), you often expose:
   1. What that character believes about the narrator
   2. What that character assumes without evidence
   3. How those beliefs shape behavior (staring, avoiding, offering unwanted help, speaking in a patronizing register)
2. Those patterns help you infer an intention such as criticizing prejudice, showing how stereotypes operate, or encouraging readers to reflect on their own automatic judgments.

Why Is Audience Response Evidence For Intention, Especially In Poetry?

In many texts, especially poetry and protest writing, authors design language to evoke particular emotions and attitudes.

The same topic can be written to produce opposite effects

1. A poem about war can be crafted to make an audience feel: