When a you empathises with a character it helps you to look deeper into how characters are developed and the language features that are used to make you like or hate certain characters or people. Understanding a characters motives and the way they are portrayed is important for developing critical thinking skills and is one of the strategies we use when using other strategies like inferencing and predicting.
Students who empathise with characters are able to identify key information in a text and can use their understanding of a character in order to visualise, predict and infer how a character might act in certain situations. It is a key strategy in learning to identify the author's purpose and how we portray people and characters in text. It builds connections between the author's choice of language features and how characters are represented in different texts.