2 Approach and

Point of View
Approach

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Angle of Approach
◈ How the writer approaches or handles the
subject
◈ Objective or subjective
◈ Depends on the writer’s circumstances

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Angle of Approach (Objective)
E.g Military strategist
To include… Not to include…
No. of bombs dropped in the Descriptions of the children
city dying in the streets as the
No. of civilian casualties bombs fell
Suffering of parents

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Angle of Approach (Objective)
E.g Psychologist
To include… Not to include…
How the children and their Number and kind of bombs
parents suffered dropped

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Angle of Approach (Objective)
◈ Free from judgments and opinions

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Angle of Approach (Subjective)
◈ Inclusion of personal feelings, opinions

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Angle of Approach
◈ Consistency of approach is important for both the
reader and the writer.

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Point of View

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Point of View
From whose point of view shall the article or book
be told?
Through whose eyes do we experience the story?
From which direction? From what distance?
Whose story is this? Who could best tell it?
What is the relation of the narrator to the events
narrated?
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Point of View
◈ Concerns through whose eyes the reader views the
action
◈ As in fiction, the narrator may be either a participant
(major or minor) or an observer.

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Point of View (First Person)

◈ Close-up, intimate, immediate, involved writing

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Point of View (First Person)
“I” as narrator and focus:
I travelled to England third class via Dunkirk and Tillbury, which is the
cheapest and not the worst way of crossing the Channel. You had to pay extra
for a cabin, so I slept in the saloon, together with most of the third-class
passengers. I find this entry in my diary for that day: “Sleeping in the saloon,
twenty-seven men, sixteen women. Of the women, not a single one has washed
her face this morning. The men mostly went to the bathroom; the women
merely produced vanity cases and covered the dirt with powder.

-from George Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris

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Point of View (First Person)
“I” as narrator and focus:
I went to the woods because I wish to live deliberately, to front only
the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to
teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did
not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to
practice resignation, unless it was quite necessary.

-from Henry David Thoreau’s “Why I Went to the Woods”

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Point of View (First Person)
“I” as narrator and focus on another person:
Eman arrived later than others at the 1968 worskhop, and by the time he got to
Dumaguete the rest of us had already read the manuscript for his Punch and
Judas. We were expecting someone much older, and then instead there was this
low-voiced Ateneo boy with his wholly unintentional flamboyance, furiously
muttering his apologies in threes, putting his foot through a Spanish guitar
from stumbling in the darkness...not liking perhaps his having fitted out to be
larger than life…: choosing to sleep alone on an outrigger boat at the beach at
night, with seawind and stars. I remember Eman.
-from Rowena Tiempo Torrevillas “Coming Face to Face with
Missing Pieces of Myself” 15
Point of View (First Person)
“I” as narrator and focus on another person
Mitchell and Ruff go to the auditorium early to look it over. It’s handsome, like
the rest of the building, but with the intimacy of a small concert hall…The
piano is an almost seven-foot grand, and Mitchell tries it out before he even
takes off his coat. It hasn’t been tuned. “The piano’s got eight A’s, all
different,” he tells me. Ruff is hailed from the highest tier by a young man who
says he will be operating the lights. Ruff shouts up to him that whatever he
wants to do will be fine. The hall begins to fill up with men and women who
have driven out from the Quad Cities. I recognize quite a few who were at the
Sunday afternoon concert.
-from William Zinsser’s Willie and Dwike: An American Profile 16
Point of View (Second Person)
◈ Usually used as a stylistic device intended to put
readers in a scene

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Point of View (Second Person)
I’ve wandered as much as three days without seeing a single other
human…
Make your way slowly from Desemboque to Bahia Kino...Camp on
empty beach or in the dessert. Climb a mountain and stare at the Isla
Tiburon. Before going read about the ethnobotany of the area, also
John Steinbeck’s Sea of Cortez.

-from Jim Harisson’s memoir Off to the Side

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Point of View (Second Person)
All of these people, it was as if they were all turning to gold, all marked
with an invisible X on their foreheads, as of course we are, too, the place
and time yet to be determined. Yes, we are burning down; time is
disintegrating. There were 229 people who owned cars and houses, slept
in beds, had bought clothes and gifts for this trip, some with price tags
still on them—and then they were gone.
Do you remember the last time you felt the wind? Or touched your
lips to the head of your child? Can you remember the words she said as
she last went, a ticket in hand?
-from Michael Paterniti’s “The Long Fall of One-Eleven Heavy”
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Point of View (Second Person)
◈ Sometimes indicates not the POV of the work but a
general truth
E.g.
Maureen was trying to write her weekly letter to Len. It was
heavy going; you can’t say much in a letter.
-from Margaret Drabble’s The Ice Age

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Point of View (Second Person)

◈ May represent the convention of the author

addressing the reader
E.g.
You might think it’s a bit rare, having long-distance cross-country
runners in Borstal...but you’re wrong, and I’ll tell you why.
-from Alan Sillitoe’s The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner

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Point of View (Third Person)
◈ To stand back for an overview, deal with more
characters, more descriptions and settings
◈ Has greatest range of effects: from total objectivity to
great intimacy

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Point of View (Third Person)
Photographs, which fiddle with the scale of world, themselves
get reduced, blown up, cropped, retouched, doctored, tricked
out. They age, plagued by the usual ills of paper objects; they
disappear; they become valuable, and get bought and sold;
they are reproduced. Photographs, which packaged the world,
seem to invite packaging. They are stuck in albums, framed
and set on tables, tacked on walls, projected as slides.
-from Susan Sontag’s On Photography
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Point of View (Third Person)
“What a beautiful view!” he said. He could hear Slayton say: “I bet it
is.” In fact, there was a cloud cover over most of the East Coast and
much of the ocean. He was able to see the Cape. He could see the
west coast of Florida…Lake Okeechobee.… He was up so high he
seemed to be moving away from Florida ever so slowly.… And the
inverters moaned up and the gyros moaned down and the fans
whirred and the cameras hummed….He tried to find Cuba. Was that
Cuba or wasn’t that Cuba? Over there, through the clouds….
Everything was black and white and there were clouds all over….
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Point of View (Third Person)
There’s Bimini Island and the shoals around Bimini. He could see
that. But everything looked so small! It had all been bigger and clear
in the ALFA trainer, when they flashed the still photos on the screen….
The real thing didn’t measure up. It was not realistic. He couldn’t see
anything but a medium-gray ocean and the light-gray beaches and the
dark-gray vegetation….

-from Tom Wolfe’s The Right Stuff

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Point of View (Third Person)
The next day New York City gave Al a ticker-tape parade up
Broadway. There was Al on the back ledge of the limousine, with all
that paper snow and confetti coming down just the way you used to
see it in the Movietone News in the theaters. Al’s hometown, Derry,
New Hampshire, which was not much more than a village, gave Al a
parade, and it drew the biggest crowd the state had ever seen. Army,
Navy, Marine, Air Force, and National Guard troops from all over
New England marched down Main Street, and acrobatic teams of jet
fighters flew overhead….
-from Tom Wolfe’s The Right Stuff
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Point of View (Multiple Points of View)
◈ Switching points of view back and forth in a piece
tends to confuse the reader, but handled right, it’s
possible to switch points of view successfully.

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Point of View (Multiple Points of View)
The quality of feeling, including moral outrage, that people can muster in
response to photographs of the oppressed, the exploited, the starving, and
the massacred also depends on the degree of their familiarity with these
images…
Photographs shock insofar as they show something novel. Unfortunately,
the ante keeps getting raised—partly through the very proliferation of
such images of horror. One’s first encounter with the photographic
inventory of ultimate horror is a kind of revelation, the prototypically
modern revelation: a negative epiphany.
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Point of View (Multiple Points of View)
For me, it was photographs of Bergen-Belsen and Dachau which I came
across by chance in a bookstore in Santa Monica in July 1945. Nothing I
have seen—in photographs or in real life —ever cut me as sharply, deeply,
instantaneously. Indeed, it seems plausible to me to divide my life into two
parts, before I saw those photographs (I was twelve) and after, though it
was several years before I understood fully what they were about. What
good was served by seeing them?

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Point of View (Multiple Points of View)
They were only photographs—of an event I had scarcely heard of and
could do nothing to affect, of suffering I could hardly imagine and could
do nothing to relieve. When I looked at those photographs, something
broke. Some limit had been reached, and not only that of horror; I felt
irrevocably grieved, wounded, but a part of my feelings started to tighten;
something went dead; some- thing is still crying.

-from Susan Sontag’s On Photography

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3 Tone and Voice

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Tone
◈ Writer’s attitude toward his subject

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Tone
Person A:
I can’t believe it. In just a few moments, Dr. Paredes extracted my
tooth and relieved me of a problem that had been plaguing me for
weeks.
Person B:
There I lay, helpless on this reclining chair, my mouth wide open, and
this man in white plunged sharp, cold instruments into my mouth and
forcibly parted me from my tooth.

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Voice
◈ Refers to certain qualities in the text, such as diction
and use of images, metaphor, allusions, which reveal
a particular personality or attitude
◈ Related to style, the writer’s particular way of using
language, the mark of personality upon the work

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“
You cannot copy someone else’s style; it comes
from within. But you can learn from stylists;
which is why writers must read. By reading the
verbal stylists---of fiction as well as
nonfiction---you’ll understand what writers can
do with words, how they can make them ‘work’
-Peter P. Jacobi
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Voice
◈ The language that comes naturally to you is the fine
and proper foundation of your voice.

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“
Make your language as rich, flexible, and varied
as you can make it. In other words: seek to voice
and your voice will follow.
-Janet Burroway

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“
...my theory is that everyone has a voice, is a
voice, and that you’re not going to lose it by
stretching your capacities and seeing what else
you can do.
-Mark Doty

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References
Burroway, Janet. Imaginative Writing: The Elements of
Craft, 4th ed. New York: Pearson, 2014.

Cheney, Theodore A. Writing Creative Nonfiction: Fiction

Techniques for Crafting Great Nonfiction. Berkeley: Ten
Speed Press, 2001.

Hidalgo, Cristina P. Creative Nonfiction: A Manual for

Filipino Writers, 2nd ed. Quezon City: UP Press, 2005.
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Activity
Write briefly about a situation in which you were badly
stressed. Write about it in the first person but from the point of
view of someone else who was present.

Or

Write about it in the second person, keeping in mind that

you’re trying to make your reader identify and “become you.”

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Assignment (Due on May 18, Friday)
Read Warren Bowe’s “Guns for Teachers” (to be emailed).

Bowe’s mini-essay belongs to the tradition of epistolary

essays, written in the form of a letter---in this case a letter to
the editor. Pick an issue you really care about and “solve” it
with a solution drastically worse than the problem.

Write in at least 3 paragraphs and print on short bond paper.

Use Times New Roman 12, single space.
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