Means - Purpose

Cause and Effect

This is the second sub-category of 'Cause and Effect' - I was driving too fast (cause) and missed the turn off (effect).

  • Reason - Result
  • Means - Purpose
  • Means - Result
  • Grounds - Conclusion

These relationships are often reported to be missing or to be exaggerated.

Means and Purpose

The most basic way of explaining this is 'How + to' - sorry, not much help is it. Lets look at some examples.

Shawn quit his job to move on to bigger and better things. Well, maybe. Kuxutshiwe
 
  Means (What was done - the How)
 Purpose (Why? The 'To')
- I studied hard at Bahrain Polytechnic to become the best at what I do and provide for my family.
 studied hard
 to become the best; provide for my family
- One [possible] way of ensuring organisational success is to have a strong strategic management team
 having a good strategic management team
 to ensure operational success
- The external environment was closely studied in order to create a comprehensive organisational action plan.
 external environment studied to create an all encompassing action plan
- Every organisation needs to have clearly stated long term goals and action plans as they ensure that everyday decisions are made in accordance with those plans and goals.
 having clearly stated long term goals and action plans to ensure decision making uniformity
- A system of online payments was implemented within the organisation to speed up transactions with customers and increase the timeliness of payments
online payments were implemented to make payments faster and on time

The manner in which you claim that something is done for a particular reason will be very useful - but remember that the purpose will most often require a citation because you are not a mind reader. This relationship often uses present simple (for things that are usually true - see example 2) and past simple (to explain why one event happened - see example 3).

Any problems with the above examples? Yup, no references and the two present simple examples have not been modalised. Check out the comparison below.

One way of ensuring organisational success is to have a strong strategic management team

OR

One possible way of ensuring organisational success is to have a strong strategic management team
Lexical modality have been added to the second sentence. This serves to soften what is being said, as we discussed before, we do not know everything, and even though we may be right, it is still possible that organizational success has no relationship with having a strong strategic management team.
 
Every organisation needs to have clearly stated long term goals and action plans as they ensure that everyday decisions are made in accordance with those plans and goals. OR Organisations should have clearly stated long term goals and action plans as they ensure that everyday decisions are made in accordance with those plans and goals.
An auxiliary model verb was added in the second sentence here. It might very well be true that every organisation needs actions plans etc,., but what if you are wrong? The addition of 'should' suggests your belief that something is a good idea, not that it is a 100% necessity.

Your Turn

Go to one of your assignments. Try to find five 'bad' means purpose sentences. Add them here, but write each of them twice. Look at the example below. Is there a difference in the meaning at all?

  • Organisations should have clearly stated long term goals and action plans as they ensure that everyday decisions are made in accordance with those plans and goals. (Pencarrow, 1988)
  • Pencarrow (1988) suggests that in order to ensure that everyday decisions are made in accordance with those plans and goals, organisations should have clearly stated long term goals and action plans.

Please also add modality to them, and think about the words that were used to add the two parts of the sentence together? What were they and can you add more?

Some other little tips

Here are some things that I have learnt from hard experience. I will not keep saying this stuff (I lied Vumela again), but try to keep it in mind as you do your assignments?

  • Only include one main idea per sentence.
  • Keep sentences short - 25 words max (ish).
  • Do not repeat yourself.
  • Use non-redundant academic language.
  • Read your work out loud.
  • Proof read at least seven times - that is one more than six, two more than five, seven less than 14.
  • Write numbers in full until ten and then write the number (see sentence above Kuxutshiwe)
  • Avoid using colloquialisms such as 'sort of' or 'basically'. Use 'somewhat' or 'fundamentally'
  • Write words out in full - '...is not...,' not 'isn't'
  • No cliches - '...at the critical moment....' not 'in the nick of time'