Narrative Viewpoints

I hadn't really asked myself whether to write essays as first-person narratives or third-person narratives before until this year. Previously, I just wrote in whichever style I felt like, and had unfortunately made a huge mistake of choosing the wrong viewpoints to write. However, from now on, I am aware of this and I would not make this mistake until I was really good at my writing skills.

For first-person narratives, pronouns like "I" is used throughout the essay and the reader is restricted to the thoughts of the narrator, which is a character from the story. These narratives show us the observations and thoughts made by the narrator about other characters, and an important point about such narratives is how trustworthy the narrator's viewpoints are. First-person narratives are effective because the reader would feel close to the narrator and the mental or psychological changes of the narrator can be shown to the reader. The difficulty of writing in such a viewpoint is that the reader has to be restricted to the narrator's point of view, which I failed to do so when I felt like writing in first-person in the past.

For third-person narratives, pronouns like "he" and she" are used throughout the essay. In this viewpoint, there are deep descriptive details, and multiple point of views from different characters. The narrator can be created as an omniscient person who seems to be all-knowing about the story. Similarly, a character from the story is chosen to be the narrator, but he is only referred to as "he", "she" or by the name. The difficulty of writing in such a viewpoint is significantly lower than the first-person viewpoint, because descriptive language are easier to be used in this viewpoint; which is why I am not going to write in first-person ever again, until my writing skills significantly improve.