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Showing posts from April 28, 2009

Give Me a Good Ol' Narrator

Three sentences: The old tractor climbed the hill and disappeared down the other side. I saw ol’ Bob on that old tractor of his, just as he was going over the hill at the Abernathy place. Didn’t you see it too, when that tractor went over the hill? We talk a lot about Point of View (POV). From a technical standpoint, all three sentences have a different POV. The first sentence is Third Person POV. The second sentence is First Person POV. The third sentence is Second Person POV. But let’s ignore the technical meaning of Point of View and consider the scene and the camera angle . In each case, it wouldn’t be hard for us to imagine that the speaker stood on a hill over looking a valley, looked out and saw Bob driving his tractor over a hill on the other side. Neither the scene nor the camera angle have changed and yet the three sentences sound completely different. Lest we think Point of View is the only thing at work here, let’s add two more first person sentences: When I saw Bob ...