Final answer:
Authors write literature primarily to persuade, entertain, and inform their readers. These purposes are essential in understanding the underlying motives behind a written piece and how readers interact with and interpret the text.
Step-by-step explanation:
Authors write literature for various purposes, but three primary reasons are: to persuade, to entertain, and to inform. First, an author may seek to persuade readers to adopt a certain viewpoint or take a specific action. This is often seen in opinion pieces, editorials, and persuasive essays. Secondly, literature is often written to entertain the audience through storytelling, creating imaginative worlds, or providing an emotional experience through poems, novels, and plays. Lastly, authors write to inform, which involves providing factual information, explaining how something works, or clarifying complex subjects through non-fiction texts, instructional materials, and expository essays.
Understanding the purpose of literature helps readers engage with the text more deeply and recognize the author's intentions, whether the literature serves to explore a topic, define an idea, or help readers think critically. By analyzing the author's life, thematic content, and the artistic construction of a text, one can grasp how literature relates to questions of philosophy, humanity, and personal worldviews.
Identifying an author's purpose is crucial in analyzing literature. During this analysis, different elements, such as narrative strategies and techniques like analogy, serve to support and clarify the author's main purpose, whether it's to compare, contrast, or employ other rhetorical strategies to effectively communicate with the intended audience.