📖 The Trap: “This is written in first person, which makes it personal.”
📖 The Trap: “This is written in first person, which makes it personal.”
Every year thousands of students write this sentence. It is not wrong. It is also worth almost nothing. The examiner already knows the text is in first person. What they are marking is whether you have read what the first person narrator actually does — how close or far the narration sits from events, whether the narrator is inside the moment or looking back on it, how much the reader is allowed to know. Naming the person is a starting line, not the finish line.
English Language glossary
- What is narrative distance?
- How close or far the narration sits from events. Close narration puts the reader inside the moment. Retrospective narration looks back from a later position of knowledge. The writer controls this dial deliberately.
Beyond naming the narrative person (first person / third person), skilled readers ask: how close or far does the narration sit from events? This is narrative distance — and it varies even within a single text.
Now try it yourself
Quiz · Question 1 of 9
What does narrative distance mean?
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