English
Guidelines for Maintaining a Consistent Point of View / Person

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• Maintaining a consistent point of view means that you establish the person (first person, second person, or third person) in the first sentence of your paragraph or essay and then continue to use that same person throughout the paragraph or essay unless there is a logical reason to change.
• Maintaining a consistent point of view helps keep your paragraph focused on one main idea and brings your many sentences together as a unified and clear piece of writing.
• Different points of view create different impressions on your reader.

First Person	Singular	Plural
Subjective Case	I	we
Objective Case	me	us
Possessive Adjective	my	our
Possessive Pronoun	mine	ours

1. When you write or speak about yourself, you are said to be using the first person point of view.  Thus, your writing is more intimate, more “subjective”; it is more personal in tone.  First person point of view is generally associated with informal, creative, or expressive writing.  It is rarely used in academic writing.

Second Person	Singular	Plural
Subjective Case	you	you
Objective Case	you	you
Possessive Adjective	your	your
Possessive Pronoun	yours	yours

2. When you write or speak about yourself, you are said to be using the first person point of view.  Thus, your writing is more intimate, more “subjective”; it is more personal in tone.  First person point of view is generally associated with informal, creative, or expressive writing.  It is rarely used in academic writing.

Third Person	Singular	Plural
Subjective Case	he, she, it	they
Objective Case	him, her, it	them
Possessive Adjective	his, her, its	their
Possessive Pronoun	his, her, its	theirs

3. When you write about people or things that do not include yourself or a person you are addressing, you are using the third person point of view.  This is the point of view used for formal academic and business writing as it is impersonal and more “objective” than the first person point of view.