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ELA 5: Points of View 1142 Views


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Description:

Point your view at the screen and we'll teach you all about points of view in this Shmoopy video. 

Language:
English Language

Transcript

00:04

[Coop and Dino singing]

00:13

Let’s say you’re looking out over a lake.

00:15

Pretty nice view. [Girl looking over a lake with binoculars]

00:17

But now there’s someone on the other side…looking out over the lake in your direction.

00:21

Same lake…very different pictures. [Girl looking over a lake and a bear with a mans face appears]

00:24

Is that…Bigfoot?

00:26

Well, when you’re reading a story, a character’s point of view is the perspective of the character…

00:30

…or who is telling the story and how they see it. [Girl reading a book on how to kill a mockingbird]

00:33

Kind of like when you get in a fight with a friend and you both have completely different

00:36

ideas about who started it… [Family driving in a car]

00:39

So how do writers communicate point of view?

00:41

Often in stories the main point of view is told from the perspective of the narrator.

00:45

This narrator might speak in first, second, or third person.

00:50

"First person" means the narrator is telling the story as if he were there witnessing it… [Boy walking down a dark street in the rain]

00:53

or if he’s a part of the story himself.

00:56

If you see a lot of “I”s and “me”s, you’ve got a first person narrator.

00:59

And a pretty self-centered one, at that…

01:02

Then there's “third person.” Third person can be all-knowing and omniscient…. [Third person sign falls from a cloud]

01:06

Or more limited—just describing characters' actions and letting us play detective about

01:10

what they're thinking. [Lou staring at his broken bike]

01:14

Most third person novels shift back and forth between the perspectives

01:17

of a number of different characters…

01:20

But be careful.

01:21

Stories sometimes give more weight to one or two perspectives than they do others. [Couple sitting on a bench and a treat jumps from a dogs nose into its mouth]

01:26

All points of view are not created equal.

01:30

Pronouns—words like I, you, he, they—are your biggest clues when figuring out point

01:35

of view in fiction and nonfiction.

01:37

Let's practice. [Piano keys making sounds]

01:39

What's the perspective here? [Boy standing on top of an elephants back]

01:43

Third person.

01:44

What about here? [Man in a hospital bed with broken arm and girl visiting him]

01:48

That's right—it's still third person, but now with dialogue.

01:52

What perspective is this? [Boy falls off an elephant]

01:55

Third person.

01:57

And now?

01:57

How about this?

02:01

Easy—first person.

02:04

And now for the tricky one… [Boy in bed sweating]

02:15

Second person is a pretty dramatic narrative point of view that writers don't use all that much.

02:20

It can get pretty old after a few pages. Still, it's fun to play around with it in your writing. [Old person reading a book]

02:25

So, uh…what’s the point?

02:28

The point is that…point of view allows us to hear from some characters who allow us to think [Car pulls up outside a house]

02:32

differently than we do…

02:34

…and that might make us think differently about some stuff, too.

02:37

Like…if we listen to Voldemort’s side of the story… maybe we’ll actually be [Voldemort inside a church building]

02:41

able to see where he’s coming from.

02:43

Okay, no, he’s just a huge jerk. [Wizard in Harry Potter robes casting a spell]

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