A second-person point of view is a narrative technique where the writer uses the pronoun “you,” directly addressing the reader. This turns the reader into a character or even a protagonist in the story. Although uncommon in fiction writing, second-person narration often appears in video games, tabletop games, recipes, and instruction manuals, where giving direct instructions or choices makes sense.
Second-person point of view exampleYou wake up on a small wooden raft drifting down a wide, muddy river. Your clothes are damp, your pack is half-open, and your companions are still asleep. Up ahead, the black shape of a ruined fortress rises through the fog, its gates creaking open as if waiting for you.
A third-person point of view is when the narrator stands outside the story and refers to the characters by name or with pronouns like “he,” “she,” or “they.” This perspective offers a broader view of events, since the narrator knows what different characters think and feel. A third-person point of view can be limited or omniscient, depending on how much of this knowledge the author wishes to relate to the reader.
Third-person point of view example “I couldn’t care less,” she said, turning her gaze toward the window. Her hands clasped the pen tightly.
A first-person point of view (also known as first-person narrative or perspective) is when a story is told from a character’s own perspective using pronouns like “I,” “me,” “we,” and “us.” This type of narrative technique lets the audience “see” the story directly through the narrator’s eyes, creating intimacy and immersion. First-person narrators are common across literary genres, especially in detective novels and memoirs.
First-person point of view example: Dracula“I did not sleep well, though my bed was comfortable enough, for I had all sorts of queer dreams. There was a dog howling all night under my window, which may have had something to do with it; or it may have been the paprika, for I had to drink up all the water in my carafe, and was still thirsty. Towards morning I slept and was wakened by the continuous knocking at my door, so I guess I must have been sleeping soundly then.”
You’re deep into the first pages of a gripping novel, completely absorbed into the world the author has built. The plot races forward, the characters feel genuine—until someone opens their mouth:
“Hello, Margaret. How are you feeling today? I am concerned about your well-being because yesterday you seemed quite distressed about the situation with your employment.”
You blink. Read it again. Nobody talks like that. Real people say things like, “Hey, you okay? You seemed pretty upset about work yesterday.” The spell is broken. You’re no longer in the story—you’re painfully aware you’re reading one.
Bad dialogue is like a speed bump in your reader’s mind. It jolts them out of the fictional dream and reminds them they’re holding a book, not experiencing a world. Great dialogue, on the other hand, disappears completely. Readers don’t even notice they’re reading words on a page because the characters feel so alive and their conversations so realistic that you become an invisible observer in their world.
Whether you’re figuring out how to write dialogue in a novel or even incorporating dialogue into an essay, the challenge remains the same: writing conversations that feel authentic to your setting and characters.
This guide will walk you through everything from proper formatting and punctuation rules to the secrets of making your characters sound like real people, not like they’re reciting from a textbook.
NoteIn British English, dialogue is the standard spelling for conversations in writing. In American English, dialog is mainly used in computing contexts, like a “dialog box” in software, though “dialogue” is still more common for everyday writing.
Tone and mood shape how we experience a story emotionally, but in different ways. While tone describes the author’s or narrator’s attitude, mood refers to the reader’s emotional response.
In this article, we’ll break down what tone and mood mean in literature, explain how they differ, and show how each works through clear examples.
An unreliable narrator is a literary device used by authors for a number of possible purposes. Such a narrator can cause mystery or confusion in the reader’s mind (e.g., in Heinrich Böll’s The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum) or emphasize the gulf between the narrator’s and reader’s worldview (e.g., in Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita).
If you’re not sure if the text you’re reading or studying has an unreliable narrator, then ask QuillBot’s free AI chat for an explanation!
Unreliable narrator in literature exampleIn Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations, we see an example of a novel with an unreliable narrator. Pip, the protagonist and narrator, muses on his ability to deceive himself, to be a “self-swindler,” thereby highlighting for the reader the inherent unreliability of the restricted point of view of a first-person narrator.
“An obliging stranger, under pretence of compactly folding up my bank-notes for security’s sake, abstracts the notes and gives me nutshells; but what is his sleight of hand to mine, when I fold up my own nutshells and pass them on myself as notes!”—from Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations
A haiku is a traditional Japanese poetic form that, when written in English, typically consists of seventeen syllables arranged in three lines of five, seven, and five syllables, respectively.
Haiku poems characteristically draw images from nature and often include seasonal references. Poets around the world have embraced the haiku format for its simplicity and economical use of language.
Japanese haiku example An old silent pond
A frog jumps into the pond—
Splash! Silence again.
“The Old Pond” by Matsuo Bashō
If you are experimenting with haiku yourself, QuillBot’s Paraphraser can help you refine your word choice and keep your language as precise and concise as the form demands.
A sonnet is a tightly structured 14-line poem, traditionally written in iambic pentameter and adhering to specific rhyme schemes. The two most common sonnet variations are the Italiansonnet (also called a Petrarchan sonnet) and the English sonnet (also called a Shakespearean sonnet). Sonnets were primarily focused on unrequited love, but also explored other themes, such as the passage of time and human nature.
Sonnet example Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer’s lease hath all too short a date;
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimm’d;
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance or nature’s changing course untrimm’d;
But thy eternal summer shall not fade,
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st;
Nor shall death brag thou wander’st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou grow’st:
So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.
—“Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?” (Sonnet 18) by William Shakespeare
Because sonnets rely heavily on precise wording, rhythm, and rhyme, writers often revise their drafts multiple times to capture the perfect balance of form and feeling. Tools like QuillBot’s Paraphraser can help refine your wording while keeping your original meaning intact— ideal for polishing the compact, expressive language sonnets demand.
The noun phrasepoint of view has several common uses. It is used in everyday language to indicate a person’s position or perspective (e.g., “I tried to see things from his point of view”). In literature it is used to describe the standpoint of the narrator of a work (e.g., “The novel relies on the third-person narrative point of view for its sense of balance”).
Point of view in a sentence examplesFrom the consumer’s point of view, the online shopping experience can be positively Kafkaesque.
In trying to see my opponent’s point of view, I realized I had lost sight of my own principles.
The Waste Land’s working title was “He Do the Police in Different Voices,” which accurately reflects how rapidly and often the point of view changes in the poem.
NoteIn the world of modern social media, the abbreviation for point of view—POV—is often used at the beginning of a video clip (e.g., “POV: You have a brother”). This refers to the idea that the video clip uses the narrator’s point of view.
An acrostic poem uses specific letters from each line to spell out a word or message when read vertically. Typically, the first letter of every line creates the hidden word, which often relates to the poem’s theme.
Acrostic poem exampleSunshine warms my face today Under bright and cheerful skies Nature wakes from winter’s gray
Stuck finding the right words for your acrostic? Use QuillBot’s Poem Generator to help you discover fresh ways to express your ideas.
