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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.
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]
Full Transcript
- 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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