12 Fact or Opinion
Thinking about the reason an author produced a source can be helpful to you because that reason was what dictated the kind of information they chose to include. Depending on that purpose, the author may have chosen to include factual, analytical, and objective information. Or, instead, it may have suited their purpose to include information that was subjective and therefore less factual and analytical. The author’s reason for producing the source also determined whether they included more than one perspective or just their own.
Authors typically want to do at least one of the following:
- Inform and educate;
- Persuade;
- Sell services or products or;
- Entertain.
Combined Purposes
Sometimes authors have a combination of purposes, as when a marketer decides she can sell more smart phones with an informative sales video that also entertains us. The same is true when a singer writes and performs a song that entertains us but that she intends to make available for sale. Other examples of authors having multiple purposes occur in most scholarly writing.
In those cases, authors certainly want to inform and educate their audiences. But they also want to persuade their audiences that what they are reporting and/or postulating is a true description of a situation, event, or phenomenon, or a valid argument that their audience must take a particular action. In this blend of scholarly authors’ purposes, the intent to educate and inform is considered to trump the intent to persuade.
Why Intent Matters
Authors’ intent usually matters in how useful their information can be to your research project, depending on which information need you are trying to meet. For instance, when you’re looking for sources that will help you actually decide your answer to your research question or evidence for your answer that you will share with your audience, you will want the author’s main purpose to have been to inform or educate his/her audience. That’s because, with that intent, they are likely to have used:
- Facts where possible.
- Multiple perspectives instead of just their own.
- Little subjective information.
- Seemingly unbiased, objective language that cites where they got the information.
The reason you want that kind of resource when trying to answer your research question or explaining that answer is because all of those characteristics will lend credibility to the argument you are making with your project. Both you and your audience will simply find it easier to believe—will have more confidence in the argument being made—when you include those types of sources.
Sources whose authors intend only to persuade others won’t meet your information need for an answer to your research question or evidence with which to convince your audience. That’s because they don’t always confine themselves to facts. Instead, they tell us their opinions without backing them up with evidence. If you used those sources, your readers will notice and not believe your arg