MYP English Lang & Lit 12.4 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:
   1. Shock and outrage (to criticize war)
   2. Pride and uplift (to glorify war)
   3. A complicated mixture (to mourn a hero while still admiring them)
2. The topic alone doesn't reveal intention; the writer's stylistic choices do.

Different audiences can respond differently

1. Even if a poet seems to be criticizing soldiers' actions, readers may disagree for different reasons, based on their own values and experiences.
2. This matters because intention is not the same as outcome: a writer can aim for one response and still trigger another.

Precision in emotion words strengthens analysis

1. In analysis, "sad" is often too vague.
2. Consider the degree and quality of emotion the text seems to target:
   1. Sympathy, pity, grief, devastation, regret, guilt, anger, disgust, awe.
3. A more precise term helps you argue intention more convincingly.

How Do Context And Genre Shape What Intentions Are Plausible?

1. Intentions are constrained by genre and context.
2. A biography, a protest poem, a campaign speech, and a personal narrative each create different expectations for truth, persuasion, and voice.

Biographical writing can be biased even when it claims to be factual

1. A biography appears to be a factual record of someone's life, but it can still contain bias.
2. A biographer may choose what to include, what to omit, and how to describe events.
3. Bias can be:
   1. Explicit, where opinions are directly stated
   2. Implicit, where opinions are suggested through selection, emphasis, and tone
4. The "authorized" or "unauthorized" status of a biography can also affect what kind of portrait is produced, because access and permission influence what information is available and what pressures the writer faces.

What Role Does Language, Structure, Technique, And Style Play?

As always, when you explain intention, you should show how it emerges from craft choices.

Language: diction, connotation, and register

1. Language choices include individual words (diction), their associated meanings (connotations), and the overall level of formality (register).
   1. Formal register can create authority or distance.
   2. Informal register can create intimacy or authenticity.
   3. Loaded adjectives and verbs can praise, blame, intensify, or soften.

Structure: ordering and sentence design

1. Structure includes how information is organized and how sentences are built:
   1. Withholding information can create suspense or force re-evaluation.
   2. Short sentences can create urgency.
   3. Long, complex sentences can reflect reflection, overwhelm, or chaos.
   4. Asyndeton (removing conjunctions in a list) can speed pace and intensify emotion.

Style: detail selection and voice

1. Style is the overall manner of expression, including which details are foregrounded.
   1. Concrete sensory detail can make a scene vivid and believable.
   2. A sparse style can feel blunt, detached, or clinical.
   3. The inclusion of anecdotes can build rapport and credibility.

How You Can Write About Your Own Intention (Rationale Writing)

1. You've likely been asked to explain your own intentions in a rationale.
2. Believe it or not this is exactly what a craft explanation is.
3. You'll typically discuss:
   1. Content: why you chose the topic and focus
   2. Language: key vocabulary decisions (adjectives, adverbs, verbs)
   3. Structure: ordering of events, sentence variety, deliberate patterns like asyndeton
   4. Technique: imagery, simile, metaphor, personification, onomatopoeia, irony, historic present
   5. Style: detail selection, anecdotes, direct quotation, register
4. Then you explain intended effects on readers.
5. This practice will train you to see texts as made of choices.
6. Everything is by design.