Glossary
point of view
Point of view is who is speaking in a passage and what that voice knows, assumes or wants — found in the pronouns and in what the passage chooses to report.
Point of view is who is speaking in a passage, and what that voice knows, assumes or wants. Start with the pronouns: I and we mean first person, you means the reader is being addressed, which is the usual voice of instructions and advice, and a passage that reports from outside is third person, where the writer's own position shows only in word choice. The second half of the skill is the harder half. A first-person passage tells you who is speaking from what the speaker says about themselves — eleven seasons on the river, a seat in a boat — and an item may ask what that voice wants you to believe, which is read from the words it chose rather than from any fact about the writer. Watch the quoted voices too: a passage that reports what the board said may be agreeing with it or quietly showing it up, and the framing words around the quotation are what decide which. Never answer a point-of-view item with a fact about the writer that the passage does not give.
Taught in
Related terms
- tone — Tone is the writer's attitude toward the subject, carried by the words chosen — not by the subject itself, and not by how the passage makes you feel.
- author purpose — The author purpose is the job a passage, or one line of it, is doing — informing, persuading, warning, recommending, explaining a process or comparing two framings — and it is named from the writing, never from the topic.
- pronoun — A pronoun stands in for a noun the passage has already named — it, they, this, which — and what it points at is often the whole question.
Source: The reading skills ATI names in its own Content Outline (R.2.1-R.2.4, under the Craft and structure sub-content area), plus the tone and passage-structure skills that sub-content area's published description names; each definition below is written for the Craft and Structure guide in this exam, in our own words, and explains the skill the way the guide teaches it. (ATI Content Outline read 2026-10-09; definitions written 2026-10-09)