Free to use and free to share. There is no sign-up, no score, and nothing a child does here is recorded or sent anywhere.
Practise it now
Drag every sentence into the hopper for what it DOES. Then read the purpose off the pile.
It covers most of this skill rather than all of it.
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A worked example
One question of the kind this skill is tested with, worked all the way through: the reasoning, and what the wrong answers are there to catch.
Why this piece of writing exists
Read the passage, then decide why it was written.
Rinse the jar in hot water and dry it completely, because a single drop left inside will spoil the jam within a week. Warm the jar in the oven for ten minutes before you fill it. Pour the jam in while both are still hot, leaving a finger's width at the top. Seal the lid at once.
To instruct the reader
To persuade the reader to make jam
To entertain the reader with a story
To describe what a jam factory looks like
Answer: To instruct the reader
How you get there
Look at how the sentences are built before you look at what they are about. Every sentence starts with a command: Rinse, Warm, Pour, Seal. They come in the order you would do them, and one of them explains what happens if you skip it. Writing built that way exists to tell a reader how to do something, so its purpose is to instruct.
Why the other answers tempt
"To persuade the reader to make jam" tempts because the passage warns you what goes wrong, and warnings feel like arguments. A warning inside a set of steps is still a step: nothing here argues that you should make jam, it assumes you already are.
If they are stuck, say this
Read only the first word of each sentence. Commands point to instruct, opinion words and "should" point to persuade, and plain facts with no commands usually point to inform.
Drag every sentence into the hopper for what it DOES. Then read the purpose off the pile.
Nowhere in this piece does the writer say why they wrote it, so there is nothing to underline. Purpose has to be worked out from what the writing DOES, move by move. Sorted out, 3 of the 7 sentences tells you what to do, against 2 that pushes an opinion - so the writer is here to guide you through a night of counting owls. The other three purposes are all real moves this text makes, which is exactly why they are tempting: there IS a feeling stirred, there ARE instructions, there IS an opinion. None of them is what the writing mostly does. That is the whole test: not "is this move in there" but "which move is the writing built out of".
Step 1. Sort the moves. Every sentence is a move the writer made. Drop each card into the hopper for what it DOES - not what it is about.
Step 2. Read the pile. Now look at the stacks. Which purpose does this pile add up to?
What to say if they get stuck
A sentence is not what it is about, it is what it does. Ask of each one: could I check this in a book, does it want me to feel something, is it telling me to do something, or is somebody arguing?
A fact survives being checked. An opinion is somebody's judgement and another person could disagree with it. An instruction has a job for you in it.
Once every card has landed, look at the stacks rather than the sentences. The tallest stack is what this writing spends most of its time doing, and that is its purpose - here it is the "tells you what to do" stack, 3 cards to 2.
Questions parents ask about identify writer purpose
Answered from what the skill map records about this skill, not from a template. Every answer here is on the page, and the same questions are the page's FAQ structured data.
Identify why a text or section was written. It is one of 41 named English skills in the 11+, in the reading strand, and this page carries 1 interactive exercise that practises it.
"To persuade the reader to make jam" tempts because the passage warns you what goes wrong, and warnings feel like arguments. A warning inside a set of steps is still a step: nothing here argues that you should make jam, it assumes you already are. The wrong answers on this skill are built out of that, not out of random numbers, so it is worth naming out loud before your child meets it under time pressure.
Point at the next move rather than explaining the whole rule. Read only the first word of each sentence. Commands point to instruct, opinion words and "should" point to persuade, and plain facts with no commands usually point to inform.
The skill map draws the line here: Excludes evaluating success of the purpose. A question past that line is testing a different named English skill, which is worth knowing before you spend a week practising the wrong one.
The reading strand holds 11 skills that are tested together, and the pages next to identify writer purpose are identify a theme, identify writer viewpoint and infer a character state. Each has its own exercise and its own link, and none of them needs an account.
Use Purpose Press, embedded on this page. It is the exercise the skill map attaches to identify writer purpose, it runs in the browser with no account to make, nothing is scored, and nothing a child does here is recorded or sent anywhere. It also has its own link, so you can send it to a child without sending them anywhere else first.
Comprehension, vocabulary, grammar and punctuation are four different problems
A free diagnostic separates them, so practice goes where the gap actually is rather than on whichever one is easiest to set.
