Perspective: Whose Eyes Are You Reading Through?

ELA 10 | Lesson 6.1 Handout

Every piece of writing comes from somewhere. Before an author puts a single word on the page, they already carry a place they grew up, a family, a set of losses and gains, a language or two, and a private sense of what matters most. That vantage point is called perspective, and it never stays out of the writing. It decides what the author notices, what they leave out, and what they think the reader needs to know first.

Perspective matters most in nonfiction, because nonfiction claims to tell you what actually happened. A student reading a news article or a personal essay can forget that a real, specific person chose every detail in it. Two people can live through the exact same event and write two completely different accounts, not because one of them is lying, but because they are looking at the event through different lives.

You can see this clearly in "Coming to Canada," a set of short pieces written by four immigrant teenagers about arriving in this country (from SightLines 10, Pearson Education Canada, 2000). Belinda Binhua Wang moved from China and spends most of her piece worried about what she is losing: the moral structure and family closeness she associates with her childhood there. Her perspective is shaped by what she is comparing Canada against. Haris Blentich moved from Yugoslavia and writes almost entirely about anger and homesickness, arguing with his father about why they ever left. His perspective is shaped by grief for the friends and the life he had before. Victor Chan, writing about his first morning in Canada, focuses on something much smaller: mispronouncing the word "donut" at a counter and feeling humiliated in front of a stranger. Three writers, one shared experience of moving to Canada, three completely different pieces of writing. None of them is wrong. Each one is true to where that writer was standing when they wrote it.

Once you notice perspective in nonfiction, you start asking better questions of everything you read. Who is telling me this. What do they have to gain or lose by telling it this way. What would someone standing somewhere else notice that this writer skipped. A skilled reader does not just absorb an account as fact. They ask what shaped it.

This is also why comparing two writers on the same event can teach you more than reading either one alone. Put Wang's grief over lost tradition next to Chan's small, specific embarrassment, and you start to see how much of nonfiction writing is really a record of one person's angle on something bigger than they are.

As you read "Coming to Canada," hold these questions in mind: What does each writer choose to focus on, and what does that choice tell you about what they were carrying with them when they arrived? If a fifth student wrote about coming to Canada from your own community, what do you think they would notice first?