An article written by: Lee Sonogan
First, second and third-person refers to a point of views that have different perspectives in writing. Your point of view has importance in telling a story, as well as the grammar in your narration. It is the lens of how your readers experience your writing. The different use of pronouns will determine how your perspective is expressed.
First Person Point of View:
When referring to yourself in your writing, you are speaking in the first person. Your choices of first-person pronouns include: ‘I,’ ‘me,’ ‘we,’ ‘us,’ ‘my,’ ‘mine,’ ‘our’ and ‘ours’. If you can use personal experience, opinions or thoughts into your work it can make the reader see through your eyes. Then your writing becomes more relatable, truthful and your voice will create strong arguments.
Second Person Point of View:
I will now change from second-person to first-person to describe a second-person point of view. Pronouns shifts that are sudden as seen as grammatical errors but as I have done above, I have explained the change. Second-person point of view directly speaks to the reader and I have been guilty of not using these pronouns to my advantage. Our choices of second-person pronouns include ‘you,’ ‘your,’ and ‘yours’.
Third Person Point of View:
As with the last pronoun shift in the previous paragraph, this one will be spoken in third-person which is the most common point of view in fiction and is a traditional form in academic writing. Third-person pronouns refer to a person, place, thing or idea. And have pronouns such as he,’ ‘she’ or ‘it’ The third-person point of view usually is either limited or omniscient making non-fiction too objective which could put readers to sleep.
I believe that the final paragraph in non-fiction writing should mostly be spoken in the first-person point of view. In our attempts to write the best quality content we can, it is easily acceptable to not consider everything. My blog over the last few years has taught me a lot to consider. What I have written is mostly in a third-person perspective and many of the sentences are in fragments. In my new blog which will be coming out this year will be written in only first and second person.