first
person |
In the first person point of
view one character tells the story. This character reveals only personal
thoughts and feelings of what s/he sees. The writer uses pronouns such as
"I" or "me" or "my". Example:
I woke up this morning feeling terrific. I hopped out of bed excited to start the new day.
I knew that today was the day my big surprise would come. |
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| second person |
With the second person point of view the
narrator tells the story using the pronoun "you". The character is someone
similar to you. Example:
You jump out of bed feeling really terrific. Then you hop out of bed excited to start the
new day. You know that today is the day that your big surprise will come. |
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third
person |
The third person point of view is the most
commonly used in fiction. When writing in the third person you will use pronouns such as
"he", "she", or "it". Example:
Brian woke up feeling terrific. He hopped out of bed excited to start the new day. He knew
that today was the day that his big surprise would come. |
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| 1. __________________ |
Excerpt from Woodsong by
Gary Paulsen
I go up to the front of the team in the darkness and drag them around, realizing we are
lost. My clothes have been ripped on tree limbs and my face is bleeding from cuts, and
when I look back down the side of the mountain we have just climbed I see twenty-seven
head lamps bobbing up the trail. Twenty-seven teams have taken our smell as the valid
trail and are following us. Twenty-seven teams must be met head on in the narrow brush and
passed and told to turn around. |
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| 2. __________________ |
Excerpted from Soldier's
Heart by Gary Paulsen
There would be a shooting war. There were rebels who had violated the law and fired on
Fort Sumter and the only thing they'd respect was steel, it was said, and he knew they
were right, and the Union was right, and one other thing they said as well--if a man
didn't hurry he'd miss it. The only shooting war to come in a man's life and if a man
didn't step right along he'd miss the whole thing.
Charley didn't figure to miss it. The only problem was that Charley wasn't rightly a man
yet, at least not to the army. He was fifteen and while he worked as a man worked, in the
fields all of a day and into night, and looked like a man standing tall and just a bit
thin with hands so big they covered a stove lid, he didn't make a beard yet and his voice
had only just dropped enough so he could talk with men. |
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| 3. __________________ |
Excerpted from Father Water, Mother Woods by Gary Paulsen
It started that simply. At the courthouse or the
library there was a large bulletin board, and for a dollar you could sign the board and
write down your guess to win the car-through-the-ice raffle. Of course, you
never met anyone who had won, but only those who knew somebody who had won, and therein,
in the winning, the simplicity was lost. |
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| 4. __________________ |
Excerpted from Nightjohn
by Gary Paulsen
A
"Tonight we just do A." He sat
back on his heels and pointed. "There it be."
I looked at it, wondered how it stood.
"Where's the bottom to it?"
"There it stands on two feet, just
like you."
"What does it mean?"
"It means A--just like I said.
It's the first letter in the alphabet. And when you see it you make a sound like this: ayyy,
or ahhhh."
"That's reading? To make that
sound?"
He nodded. "When you see that letter
on paper or a sack or in the dirt you make one of those sounds. That's reading." |
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| 5. __________________ |
Excerpted from Caught by the Sea by Gary Paulsen
I drove to California that very day, straight to the coast,
then north, away from people, to a small town named Guadalupe, near Santa Maria. There I
bought some cans of beans and bread and Spam and fruit cocktail and a cheap sleeping bag
and then walked out through the sand dunes, where I could hear the surf crashing. I walked
until I could see the water coming in, rolling in from the vastness, and I sat down and
let the sea heal me. |
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| 6. __________________ |
Excerpted from Guts by Gary Paulsen
I have spent an inordinate amount of time in wilderness woods,
much of it in northern Minnesota, some in Canada and some in the Alaskan wilds. I have
hunted and trapped and fished and have been exposed to almost all kinds of wilderness
animals; I’ve had bear come at me, been stalked by a mountain lion, been bitten by
snakes and punctured by porcupines and torn by foxes and once pecked by an attacking
raven, but I have never seen anything rivaling the madness that seems to infect a large
portion of the moose family. |
 |
1. __________________ |
The moose is the largest member of the deer family. The male adult weighs about 454 kg.
The largest species can weigh up to 681 kg. They can grow 7 feet tall. Moose lose their
antlers in the spring. The antlers are covered with fur. A bull moose has a body color
that is brownish-black. They have long legs and a big head. |
| 2. __________________ |
But something caught his ear or nose and he began to turn, and had his head half around,
when he saw a brown wall of fur detach itself from the forest to his rear and come down on
him like a runaway truck. He just had time to see that it was a moose - he knew them from
pictures but did not know, could not guess how large they were - when it hit him. It was a
cow and she had no horns, but she took him in the left side and threw him out into the
water and then came after him to finish the job. |
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|
3. __________________ |
He
could do nothing, think nothing. His tongue, stained with berry juice, stuck to the roof
of his mouth and he stared at the bear. It was black, with a cinnamon-colored nose, not
twenty feet from him and big. No, huge. It was all black fur and huge. He had seen one in
the zoo in the city once, a black bear, but it had been from India or somewhere. This one
was wild, and much bigger than the one in the zoo and it was right there. |
| 4. __________________ |
The
American black bear is medium sized. It can be found in many colors from black to
chocolate brown, or from cinnamon brown to a pale blue. They have lighter fur on their
chests and a brown muzzle. Black bears weigh between 130 to 660 pounds and can be 50 to 75
inches long. Their feet end with strong curved claws. The black bear has poor eyesight. |
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 |
5. __________________ |
Turn,
smell, listen, feel and then a sound, a small sound, and he looked up and away from the
lake and saw the wolf. It was halfway up the hill from the lake, standing with its head
and shoulders sticking out into a small opening, looking down on him with wide yellow
eyes. He had never seen a wolf and the size threw him - not as big as a bear but somehow
seeming that large. The wolf claimed all that was below him as his own, took Brian as his
own. |
| 6. __________________ |
The
wolf is one of the largest members of the dog family. The gray wolf weighs 75 to
120 pounds. They are 5 to 6 1/2 feet long. The red wolf weighs about 66 pounds. The fur of a wolf varies in color from
the pure white the of the Arctic plains species to the jet black of the sub-arctic forest
species. Most wolves are gray. The gray wolf's coat varies from gray to a tawny-buff. The
red wolf's coat is cinnamon or tawny with gray and black highlights. Wolves look like a
large German shepherd dogs except they have longer legs, bigger feet, a wider head, and a
long bushy tail. |