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Being the author!
Viewpoints
You will learn most from this task if you complete it in discussion with
others. Below is a description of part of a story we have invented. We
have tried to tell it in as neutral or 'objective' a way as possible.
In other words, we have made a point of narrating it so that it is not
'attached' to the viewpoint of any of the participants/characters.
Your overall task is to re-tell the story from the
viewpoint of one of the characters, and consider how you have changed
the text to achieve that. But to help you, we have broken that overall
task down into a number of stages.
- Read the text below a couple of times until you feel
you are familiar with it, then discuss what features of the text give
it the 'neutrality' we have tried to achieve and compare your conclusions
with what we say (by clicking on the text).
(1) A woman is sitting
in a room with the door closed.
(2) She is stroking a cat, which is sitting on her lap.
(3) A man, who has a gun in his hand (he is a policeman looking for
an escaped murderess) enters the room suddenly. (4) The woman jumps
up in fright.
(5) The cat runs past the man and out through the door.
(6) The woman attacks the man with a knife. (7) In reaction he shoots
the woman,who receives a wound in the arm.
- Below the story is repeated. Click on the number of each sentence
to see a picture of what is described from the neutral viewpoint we
have adopted.
(1) A woman is sitting in
a room with the door closed.
(2) She is stroking a cat, which is sitting on her lap.
(3) A man, who has a gun in
his hand (he is a policeman looking for an escaped murderess) enters
the room suddenly. (4)
The woman jumps up in fright.
(5) The cat runs past the man and out through the door.
(6) The woman attacks the
man with a knife. (7)
In reaction he shoots the woman, who receives a wound in the arm.
- Now imagine the story as it would be perceived by just ONE of the
characters, the man or the woman. Draw a picture of each step of the
story to take account of the restricted viewpoint you choose. This set
of drawings will be the basis of your writing task below. Note that
restricting the viewpoint in this way will mean that some of the visual
information we have provided in our 'click-ons' above may 'disappear'
as a result of the viewpoint restriction.
- Now rewrite the sentences in the original story, from the point of
view of either the woman or the man, to correspond with the pictures
you have drawn. Use the 1st-person and past tense narration mode. Stick
as closely as you can to what is described in the original (don't invent
unnecessary new events, for example), but pay close attention to encapsulating
the perceptions related to the viewpoint you have chosen to represent.
You can insert a few important extra details where you feel they are
really necessary, but only if they are strictly relevant to the change
in viewpoint. This is not a free exercise in creative writing! We are
most interested in your narrating roughly the same content as in the
original, but from the point of view of the different participants,
so that you can see how particular linguistic forms are indicative of
viewpoint. Change the words as much as you like, while keeping the basic
content intact. You may find that you need to omit particular details
from our original, or change the sequence in which the events occur.
Note that there are many possible ways in which you can adequately re-cast
the story. There isn't just one reasonable 'answer' (though there are
also even more re-casts that are inadequate, and which you may well
not even consider!)
- Note down what linguistic changes have you made in
order to adopt this new viewpoint.
- Now compare your work for steps 4 and 5 above with
our efforts.
Man's Viewpoint
Woman's
Viewpoint
- Is the neutral text we started with really neutral?
After you have considered this question, compare what you think with
what we think.
Our answer
- Could you have restricted the viewpoint to just one of the characters
while using a 3rd-person narration mode?
Our answer
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