Non fiction writing: purpose, audience & structure

What matters most is identifying your purpose and audience. From there, that determines the shape (structure) and tone of your writing. For example, in this text on making pies as both a creative outlet and an outlet for frustration, the purpose is to showcase creative and innovative ways to deal with lockdown. With its edgy content (fuck this shit and a reference to cunt), it is definitely aimed at people who are open to acknowledging that swearing is part of the frustration process in lockdown for many people. Even though we have looked at it in class, we can't use the same language in our formal or creative writing, as a school is an environment where we are all expected to find alternatives to swearing. But otherwise, the format of the writing is to introduce a creative person, supported by photographs, with their challenge and their response, and then to unravel the backstory behind their decision, and give a range of examples to showcase their talent. The article finishes on an upbeat note, with Devoney Scarfe sharing her ideas on social media and brimming with more creative pie ideas, and the humour of her son only wanting something that is not a pie. This is a model which works reliably well when profiling a person.


You can see a similar but not identical structure in this article about the arts in lockdown. It starts with a very personal story, with a level of sensual (multiple senses) detail which helps us imagine ourselves in the profiled person's home. Then it links this experience to wider themes in the arts industry, and explores a range of responses people have made and concerns they still have. For each example, photographs and detailed examples are used to help us empathise with the people being profiled.


The issue of purpose and audience is distinctly different in the instagram post by Aigagalefili Fepulea’i Tapua’i. The expectations in terms of spelling and capitalisation rules are quite different on instagram compared to at school, or in a newspaper. But Aigagalefili uses repetition ("it's ironic") to persuasively develop her point that the expectations of students in poor schools and the actual opportunities for learning they had in lockdown are not fair and do not match. She contrasts both wealth and ethnicity using references to young people's lives in different parts of Auckland. Her writing is about equity, and it is much more emotionally confronting, as fits her purpose of speaking up about lives which have been ignored by the media.


There are many more examples of different structures in formal writing, or more accurately, non- fiction writing. If you can share with me what you are interested in writing about, then I can add more information to this blog post.

Lockdown learning tutorial Friday 8 May 2020

You are all SO talented!

Thank you thank you for sharing your favourite sentence or cluster of sentences from the writing you did over the last week on your dinner party murder mystery.

For next week, please just spend TWO hours only on developing your murder mystery story further.

If you would like a change of activity, then below is an alternative writing task. 

For reading inspiration, have a look through the fabulous Lockdown Letters published on The Spinoff. 

Then, as you consider the work you have done over the last six weeks, the skills you have developed, the restrictions and the freedoms you have had in your learning, respond to the following statement, thinking particularly of schools:

"There is no going back to normal." True or false?

I look forward to seeing you all next Friday, and hopefully seeing everyone in the classroom the week after.  You are very welcome to email me before then, and we can make a small group or 1:1 google meet.

Homework: creative writing

Your task is to select a setting and a set of characters for your murder mystery (possibly a murder mystery dinner party).  Using the techniques we saw in G K Chesterton's The Secret Garden, develop your first four paragraphs of a murder mystery short story, focusing on the setting and the characters.

Your goal is to use the setting to create a striking sense of atmosphere, and to help the reader understand the world that they have entered by reading your work.  Then I want you to introduce your characters, and help the reader understand something of what each character looks like, their motivations and whether they are likeable, or indeed trustworthy, at first impression.

Please write this in a new document in your ENL212 folder in your google drive, and share it with me by 5pm Thursday 7 May.  I will read your writing on Thursday evening, and use it to plan our session for the following day.