author's purpose strand teks talk image

Knowledge and Skills Statement

Author's purpose and craft: listening, speaking, reading, writing, and thinking using multiple texts. The student uses critical inquiry to analyze the authors' choices and how they influence and communicate meaning within a variety of texts. The student analyzes and applies author's craft purposefully in order to develop his or her own products and performances.

Assist students in creating a visual to use as an aid in determining point of view. Create a line to demonstrate the distance between the narrator and the reader with third-person limited closer to the narrator and third-person omniscient further from the narrator. Have students read a text and identify the point of view as well as evidence in the text that leads the reader to the conclusion.
 

 

Distance in Point of View

 

Further Explanation

Students are expected to think critically about a text in order to determine the author’s choices in using literary devices, such as point of view, to produce a given effect on the reader and to communicate a particular detail or message. Additionally, students determine the difference between omniscient and limited point of view. It is important for students to develop knowledge of a variety of literary devices. This activity can be completed with multiple literary devices.

Literary devices are specific language techniques that convey meaning and bring clarity to a text. Students should understand that authors use literary devices such as point of view to produce a given effect on the reader and to communicate a particular detail or message. For example, an author wanting to create suspense in a mystery novel might use a third-person limited point of view so the reader has no more insight into the motivations or mindsets of the other characters than the protagonist and, therefore, can speculate until the author chooses to reveal the mystery’s secret.
a narrative perspective that is limited to the author or narrator’s understanding of only one character’s thoughts and feelings and in which the story follows that single character (usually the main character in narratives) using the third-person pronouns (e.g., he, she, they)
a narrative perspective that includes the thoughts and feelings of all the characters in a story or text using third-person pronouns (e.g., he, she, they)
This knowledge is not limited by any one character or person’s view or behavior as the author/narrator is all knowing.