When first learning about  “purpose” I figured it would be the reason why you’re writing, thankfully it was just that and purpose became easy to understand. It’s a very straightforward element with no hidden meaning or idea.

Purpose is establishing what I want my writing piece to achieve by the end of the essay or document. In your document or report it’s important to explain your topic thoroughly, inform the reader, persuade the reader (if necessary). Your purpose is the reason you’re writing in the first place, so making it clear and concise for the reader is very important. Your purpose will tie in with every aspect of your writing one way or another. An example of this is your sources and research. Your purpose ties in with your sources as to show if they’re reliable, and if they provide adequate knowledge of the topic. To achieve your purpose, you need to do your part of researching and brainstorming on a topic. You have to go into writing a paper sounding like you’re an expert in that field.

An example of purpose can be from the engineering proposal project. My team’s engineering proposal was “California Coastal turbine project”, which was a project to have coastal wind turbines off the coast of California as a means of emergency energy supply. Our audience was the California State Government and our purpose was to get government funds and approval for our project (see figure 1 below). To get what we needed, we explained why our solution to this problem of power outages was better than other solutions in the past and present. We had also included information and a breakdown on how the project would get done. We had included information on how blackouts affect the area we were going to be in before explaining how our turbines would solve this idea. To make everything sound as appealing as possible we explain how the process would go and how we account for different things happening so as to not waste the time of the state’s government. The purpose tied in with all of that because by establishing our purpose early on we were able to make our wants and explain our process of making the solution possible in a simpler way. 

The engineering proposal “California Coastal turbine project” can be found in the dropdown menu under “Revised Assignments”, on the submenu called “Engineering Proposal ”.

Figure 1. Objective section from Engineering Proposal