This lesson aligns with the 7th grade Social Studies curriculum and works best when integrated into an interdisciplinary unit, such as Reliving the Middle Ages Across Lliterary Genres. Interdisciplinary Units are effective when teachers from two different content areas collaborate to plan lessons, assessments, activities and projects that support their content skills and standards. The content being taught in one course supports the content in another and students approach difficult, content-specific texts with more familiarity and gain better comprehension.  Students read two nonfiction articles about the Middle Ages, which lasted from about A.D. 500 to A.D. 1500. Both texts examine one of the most significant events of this time period-- the spread of the bubonic plague, or the Black Death. Each text is organized into cause-and-effect pattern of organization. One outlines HOW the disease spread (causes) and the other explains how it affected Europe (effects). Students analyze two texts by different authors writing about the same topic, the Black Plague, and compare/contrast how each author shapes their presentations of key information by emphasizing different evidence. 

In this lesson plan, students practice the important task of determining audience and purpose for their writing. Students work in groups to write for a randomly assigned audience and purpose, adjusting their writing as necessary for the given combination.

Students read an informational passage and attempt to identify the purpose of the speech as well as the effect created through repetition. This activity may be used to help review the steps to answer constructed response style questions or as a means to teach it.

Students are introduced to the various purposes for writing informational text. Students use newspapers or online articles to identify examples that were written for each of the specific purposes and provide a summary.

The resource is a SOAPSTone graphic organizer template. SOAPSTone is an analysis tool.

In this lesson on the writings of Truman Capote, students focus on author's purpose in, In Cold Blood and A Christmas Memory. They compare the intended audience for the two pieces as a start to a discussion about the use of language to manipulate meaning.

In this lesson students will learn to write and analyze technical writing instructiuons with consideration to audience, purpose, context, length, and complexity using common household items. After writing their own instructions, students will conduct usability tests of each other’s instructions, providing user feedback. Finally, students use this user feedback to revise their instructions before publishing them.