POINT OF VIEW
FIRST PERSON
First person is used when the main character is telling the story. This is the kind that uses the "I" narrator. Readers experience the story through the speaker's eyes.
SECOND PERSON
Second person point of view is generally only used in instructional writing. It is told from the perspective of "you".
THIRD PERSON
Third person POV is used when your narrator is not a character in the story. Third person uses the "he/she/it" narrator and it is the most commonly used POV in writing.
Point of View
Point of view, or the kind of narration = who is telling the story:
first person (I, me, my)
second person (You)
third person (he, she, they).
First person narrators have many advantages, including credibility and intimacy. A first person narrator is often more believable because the reader gets access to his or her thoughts and beliefs. However, there are disadvantages, too. The narrator’s characterizations of events, people, and places will be colored by his or her attitudes, prejudices, limitations, and shortcomings. In many ways, it makes them unreliable because their observations may not always fully adhere to the truth. The reader must form an opinion based on how other characters react to the narrator, and by the narrator’s actions, thoughts, and dialogue.
Third person narration can be split into two categories: omniscient and limited point of view.
An omniscient narrator is someone who can access the thoughts and beliefs of many characters without limitations, and can explain past, present, and future events to the reader. This gives an enormous amount of freedom to the narrator, and it is advantageous because an omniscient narrator can often interpret the motivations of characters or the importance of events directly to the reader. It also has a disadvantage in its loss of intimacy with the reader.
A limited third person narrator is restricted to one particular character’s experiences and thoughts. It again allows a sense of intimacy and credibility with the reader, but the author is still able to pepper in details that the character may not otherwise know or realize. There is still room for the author to interpret some things for the reader, and to characterize the narrator in more detail.
second person narration
The best way to explain this is to look at the directions on a quiz or test, or pull out a cookbook, an instruction manual, or anything else that directly instructs the reader. The major pronoun in second person narration is you, with the you being the reader. It is not often used in fiction, other than the choose-your-own-adventure books where the author instructs the reader to make a certain choice and turn to a particular page. (R.L. Stine wrote many of these types of books in the mid-90s with his Give Yourself Goosebumps special edition series. Edward Packard originally created the concept in 1976.)