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POV Consistency

Point of view errors are common in manuscript drafts; for example, you might be writing in the third person throughout, but then a paragraph or scene will be told in the first person, or the other way around.

Another option is to write a book with multiple points of view, with some characters told in the first person and others in the third. You can use this report to make sure that your use of that structure is consistent throughout the entire book.

We frequently and readily switch between first- and second-person perspectives in conversation; we do this without even realizing it. For instance,

“When I arrived at the club, I anticipated it would take me a long time to enter, however the moment you go in, you are hurried inside.”

Consistency in point of view can prevent what we refer to as “head hopping.” When you abruptly go from one narrator’s point of view to another without giving the reader any prior notice, you are head-hopping. This is a typical issue among even seasoned authors and can be highly perplexing to the reader.

When writing from an omniscient point of view, this problem is most prevalent. That implies that the story is being told by an anonymous, all-knowing narrator who is privy to the innermost thoughts and feelings of each character.

Words like “I,” “Me,” “Myself,” “You,” “Yours,” “They,” “He,” and similar expressions serve to denote a person’s various points of view in a POV (point of view) consistency report. Here, the report will record every viewpoint a person is capable of and then provide it in the findings. When a user selects a word in the result, the report will mark that word in the document or book. The result will display which words are from which point of view.