Who’s Talking: Dialogue and Point of View in Personal Essay

Lesson 3 of 8: Finding Your Essay’s Heartbeat

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Today, we’re going to look at dialogue and point of view—who’s talking and how. Personal essays are often told from the point of view (POV) of a first-person narrator using the pronouns I, me, my, and mine. This is my story based on experiences from my life—so that choice for POV makes sense. But I/me isn’t the only point of view used in personal essay. We’ll explore other POVs and how to present dialogue, too. Let’s dive in.

Here are some thoughts about dialogue before we get into the readings. These questions always come up.

Memory and Dialogue. We don’t walk around recording our daily conversations, so dialogue is recreated. Even though personal essays are true stories, we won’t remember past conversations word for word, no one does. We do our best to represent what was said accurately. We won’t include every line and word from a conversation in our essays—it’s not a trial transcript. We’ll select the dialogue that best moves the narrative and shows the readers who is talking and how. 

Presentation. Dialogue can be external, like two people having a conversation, or internal, like an individual thinking in their head. Dialogue can be presented several ways, in quotations, in italics, or with no quotation or italics, and we’ve already seen these different styles in the essays we’ve read so far: