The focus of the referential purpose is on factual information. In its two main forms, the referential purpose is used to present factual information or to draw logical conclusions based on those facts. Referential writing presents a thesis, then provides evidence that supports the thesis.
Referential-Informative Purpose
The referential-informative form presents information that is factual, accurate, objective, and comprehensive. This form simply gives facts and does not interpret them. This form answers the traditional questions Who, What, When, Where, How? An encyclopedia article on a topic would be a good example of referential-informative writing. A newspaper report on a crime would be another good example.
| Example: 3 August 1728 On 3 August 1728 two ladies going in a chariot from Beckingham to Bromley, were robbed by a single highwayman. On Saturday evening the Rev. Uvedale's Lady, and another Gentlewoman, coming over the Chace to Enfield in a coach, were robb'd by 3 highwaymen. (The Weekly Journal)
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The writer tells who, what, when, where, and how in the news report.
The referential-interpretive form presents logical conclusions that are solidly based on the facts given. In this form, the writer gives facts and makes inferences or draws conclusion based on those facts. An investigation analyzing irregular accounting practices at a big company would likely have a referential-interpretive report at the end. Facts about the accounting practices would be given, and a conclusion about the regularity of the practices would be reached.
Two things must happen for interpretive writing to succeed.
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Example: Patience Kershaw uses the expressive purpose in "The Testimony of Patience Kershaw." One main characteristic of expressive writing, the use of first-person pronouns, is evident through most of the article. For example, the girl says in the first sentence, "My father has been dead about a year." Kershaw uses a second characteristic of expressive writing, personal experiences, as she testifies about her work in the coal mines. She says, "I go to pit at five o'clock in the morning." She also gives details about the work she must do in the mines and the conditions she must work in.
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The writer of the analysis makes logical conclusions and supports the conclusions with facts from the article. The first, second, and fourth sentences would be considered analytical conclusions, and the other sentences give supporting facts from the article.
You may encounter other forms of referential writing in your reading, but you will not deal with them in this course. This section is meant to give you a passing knowledge of the forms.
Referential-exploratory writing is more speculative than informative or interpretive. In referential-exploratory writing, the writer presents a thesis in the form of a question:
Referential-reflective purpose is the least objective of the referential forms. This kind of writing, made popular with the New Journalism of the 1960s and 1970s, tends to dramatize reality. This form is also known as parajournalism. The writer deals with real people but uses literary techniques to explain a real situation. The writer may use a dramatic structure, telling the story as though it were a narrative plot. First-person narration is often used in this form, and the objectivity of the writing is often compromised by personal opinions. In some regards, this form is more expressive than referential. Jack London's eyewitness report on the 1906 San Francisco earthquake is a good example of this form of the referential purpose.
This form of writing helped Janet Cooke of the Washington Post to win the 1981 Pulitzer Prize for Feature Writing. When it was discovered that her award-winning article about an 8-year-old heroin addict was fiction, Cooke lost the prize. (In her defense, Cooke said that the title character in the "Jimmy's World" article was a composite character and not just one real person.)
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Example (referential-informative): The Battle of the Alamo took place in San Antonio, Texas, during the early part of 1836. A group of about 180 men, led by William Travis, David Crockett, and James Bowie, fortified an old Spanish mission known as the Alamo. The small group of men was able to thwart the advance of Mexican troops led by General Santa Anna for a period of 13 days. Finally, on March 6, 1836, the Alamo fell to the superior Mexican force, its defenders dead.
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Primary Purpose: Referential-Informative
Main Patterns: Narration, Description
In the 17th century, it was illegal for women to be scolds. A scold is someone who is noisy or quarrelsome. Women who were scolds were often punished publicly. The typical punishment was to plunge the scold repeatedly into the water using a ducking stool. There were many designs for such ducking machines. The excerpt below gives details about one kind of ducking stool. The excerpt is from page 14 in Curious Punishments of Bygone Days, by Alice Morse Earle, published by Herbert S. Stone & Co., Chicago, 1896.
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When this machine was not in use, it was secured to a stump or bolt in the ground by a padlock because when left free it proved too tempting and convenient an opportunity for tormenting village children to duck each other.
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The Great Wall of China stretches from the western city of Jiayuguan to the Yellow Sea. Between these points, the wall zigzags across 2,150 miles of differing terrain. It is so long and massive that astronauts can see the wall as they orbit Earth. Building the wall took 1,800 years and millions of laborers.
Around 200 B.C., the Chinese emperor Shi Huangdi decided to build the wall to keep Mongolian invaders out of China. The wall followed the rise and fall of the land. It ran along rivers instead of across them and up hills rather than around them. By the end of Shi Huangdi's 15-year rule, about 1,200 miles of the Great Wall had been constructed.
The excerpt is from An Historical, Geographical, and Philosophical View of the Chinese Empire, pages 273-275, by William Winterbotham. The book was printed for and sold by the editor, J. Ridgway, York Street; and W. Button, 1795. The photograph is from the National Archives and Records Administration: "Troop L, 6th U.S. Cavalry, at the Great Wall of China, East of Nan-Kow Pass, 1900."
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Primary Purpose: Referential-Interpretive
Main Patterns: Narration, Description (Analysis)
The paragraph below is an example of referential-interpretive analysis of an element in a fictional short story. The paragraph discusses the central character's main conflict in Maupassant's "The Necklace." The writer draws analytical conclusions based on facts of the story. You might write this kind of paragraph in English 1302.
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Primary Purpose: Referential-Interpretive
Main Patterns: Classification, Evaluation
Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) was a groundbreaking psychoanalyst in the late 1800s. His theories of ego and sexuality were controversial in his times. The excerpt is from Chapter 1, page 7 in The Interpretation of Dreams by Sigmund Freud, originally published in 1899. The excerpt was translated by A.A. Brill, 1911.
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Joseph McCabe (1856-1939) was one of the main figures in English atheism and the Freethinker movement. He was also a prolific author on controversial topics. The excerpt below is from Chapter 1 of The Story of Evolution, by Joseph McCabe, published in 1912.
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Then certain enterprising sailors--Vasco da Gama, Maghalaes, Columbus--brought home the news that the known world was only one side of an enormous globe, and that there were vast lands and great peoples thousands of miles across the ocean. The minds of men in Europe had hardly strained their shells sufficiently to embrace this larger earth when the second discovery was reported. The roof of the world, with its useful little system of heavenly bodies, began to crack and disclose a profound and mysterious universe surrounding them on every side. One cannot understand the solidity of the modern doctrine of the formation of the heavens and the earth until one appreciates this revolution.
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The idea of the vault had come from Babylon, the first home of science. No furnaces thickened that clear atmosphere, and the heavy-robed priests at the summit of each of the seven-staged temples were astronomers. Night by night for thousands of years they watched the stars and planets tracing their undeviating paths across the sky. To explain their movements the priest-astronomers invented the solid firmament. Beyond the known land, encircling it, was the sea, and beyond the sea was a range of high mountains, forming another girdle round the earth. On these mountains the dome of the heavens rested, much as the dome of St. Paul's rests on its lofty masonry. The sun travelled across its under-surface by day, and went back to the east during the night through a tunnel in the lower portion of the vault. To the common folk the priests explained that this framework of the world was the body of an ancient and disreputable goddess. The god of light had slit her in two, "as you do a dried fish," they said, and made the plain of the earth with one half and the blue arch of the heavens with the other.
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The trebuchet, or trebucket, was a stationary and simple form of a ducking machine consisting of a short post set at the water's edge with a long beam resting on it like a see-saw. By a simple contrivance it could be swung round parallel to the bank, and the culprit tied in the chair affixed to one end. Then the offender could be swung out over the water and see-sawed up and down into the water.
As has been said, those writers of antiquity who preceded Aristotle did not regard the dream as a product of the dreaming psyche, but as an inspiration of divine origin, and in ancient times, the two opposing tendencies which we shall find throughout the ages in respect of the evaluation of the dream-life, were already perceptible. The ancients distinguished between the true and valuable dreams which were sent to the dreamer as warnings, or to foretell future events, and the vain, fraudulent and empty dreams, whose object was to misguide him or lead him to destruction. 
The beginning of the victorious career of modern science was very largely due to the making of two stimulating discoveries at the close of the Middle Ages. One was the discovery of the earth: the other the discovery of the universe. Men were confined, like molluscs in their shells, by a belief that they occupied the centre of a comparatively small disk--some ventured to say a globe--which was poised in a mysterious way in the middle of a small system of heavenly bodies. The general feeling was that these heavenly bodies were lamps hung on a not too remote ceiling for the purpose of lighting their ways.