Eliminating on a Point of View Question

Point of view choices usually offer some mix of first person, second person, third limited, third omniscient, and objective (a camera that reports no thoughts at all). You do not need to read the whole passage to cut most of these. Pronouns alone kill first and second person if the text never says I or you about the storytelling voice. Then ask whose mind, if any, gets opened. If only one character's thoughts appear, omniscient is gone, because omniscient means access to multiple minds. If any thought at all appears, objective is gone, because objective narration shows only actions and speech. Most of the time this leaves one answer standing before you have weighed a single word of tone or diction.

First person needs a second check. A narrator who says I is not automatically a character caught up in the plot. Some first person narrators are compilers or witnesses, assembling an account from what others told them, physically or emotionally remote from the events. Look for how the I relates to the action: present and acting, or present only in the telling, writing from outside the story's center. That distinction decides whether a choice calling the narrator a participant is right or a trap.

When a stem asks about the effect of a shift in narration, naming the shift is only step one. The real work is saying what changes for the reader once the lens moves: what new information arrives, what the reader now knows that the original character does not, and how the return to the original point of view reads differently in light of it. This is also where point of view questions meet structure questions, since a shift usually marks a turn the passage is building toward.