False purpose is when a sentence suggests an action was performed for a specific purpose when it wasn’t. This can be accidental or intentional, and can be corrected by fixing word order or removing the implied intent. False purpose is often used intentionally in sports reporting and political commentary.
A false purpose is an intentional or accidental grammatical structure that ascribes a particular purpose to an action when no such purpose or intent actually existed. The grammatical structure, usually a sentence, refers to an action that actually occurred, but incorrectly suggests that the action occurred or was performed for a particular purpose. Careless use of words and sentence structuring can lead to accidentally ascribing a false purpose to a certain action. In many cases, however, purpose is intentionally attached to a given action, often to attack or praise someone who has little to do with the actual action.
It is possible for a writer or speaker to develop a false purpose in many different ways within a given grammatical construction. Writing “The boy walked down the street to find that his favorite store was closed the previous day,” for example, suggests that the boy walked down the street with the intent of finding that his favorite store was closed. Bad word order can also lead to false resolutions. The poor word order in the statement “the brothers decided to sell the estate of their father who recently died because they needed money” suggests that the father died because his children needed money, thus attributing a false purpose to the his death.
Correcting the false purpose is generally quite simple. In most cases, purpose is suggested by the misuse of the word “to,” as in “John hit the ball to score two runs for his team.” It is unlikely that John’s explicit goal was to score exactly two runs for his team. You could correct this by simply replacing “to mark” with “and marked” or something similar which removes the implied intent. Correcting instances of false purpose based on word order is a simple matter of fixing the word order in the poorly constructed sentence.
False intent is sometimes used intentionally, usually to trick readers into thinking that, for better or worse, someone has performed a certain action with the intent of causing particular consequences. This is especially common in sports reporting and political commentary. A sports commentator may, for example, want to praise an athlete by making it appear that some unexpected positive by-product of his actions was completely intentional. Conversely, a political commentator may attempt to attack a politician by suggesting that a negative outcome of a policy change was the actual intent of the politician.
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