2. Why use it?

3. Examples

The stranger looked at me, his eyes with a sudden intent, and his face taking on an expression that I neither understood nor found pleasant.
“Now we begin.”
It was at this moment that I knew what had I failed to see before. Oh, I had been so foolish, and so enamoured with his bravado, that I had ignored the one danger: his purpose. I was to be the guinea pig, the test subject, and I had walked willingly into it! I looked around for a door, or any type of exit, but found only locks and the knowledge that my sole escape was to fight. Without checking my bravery, my upbringing, or my lifelong reticence to engage in violence of any nature, I ran at him with arms outstretched.

Woodham Road has always held a special place in my heart. It was here that, during my childhood, I played games with those who would become friends for years to come. Later, during my teenage pains, it was also the space where I hid when escaping my parents and the pressure cooker of home. At the end of the street, outside the post office, is where I had my first kiss. Being back there now, walking between the buildings that were much the same but noticing the small changes that had occurred in a few corners, I felt a sort of longing for those days lost to the past. I am not a person who usually embraces nostalgia, but there was something odd about this road that felt like I was spying on a person I knew, a stranger lost in history that I barely accepted was actually me.

4. Examples in literature

I am Malala
by Malala Yousafzai with Christina Lamb

Excerpt from Chapter 20:

The air smelt of diesel, bread and kebab mixed with the stink from the stream where people still dumped their rubbish and were never going to stop despite all of the campaigning by my father and his friends. But we were used to it. Besides, soon the winter would be here, bringing the snow, which would cleanse and quieten everything.
The bus turned right off the main road at the army checkpoint. On a kiosk was a poster of crazy-eyed men with beards and caps or turbans under big letters saying WANTED TERRORISTS. The picture at the top of a man with a black turban and beard was Fazlullah. More than three years had passed since the military operation to drive the Taliban out of Swat had begun. We were grateful to the army but couldn’t understand why they were still everywhere, in machine-gun nests on roofs and manning checkpoints. Even to enter our valley people needed official permission.
The road up the small hill is usually busy as it is a short cut but that day it was strangely quiet. ‘Where are all the people?’ I asked Moniba. All the girls were singing and chatting and our voices bounced around inside the bus.
Around that time my mother was probably just going through the doorway into our school for her first lesson since she had left school at age six.
I didn’t see the two young men step out into the road and bring the van to a sudden halt. I didn’t get a chance to answer their question , ‘Who is Malala?’ or I would have explained to them why they should let us girls go to school as well as their own sisters and daughters.
The last thing I remember is that I was thinking about the revision I needed to do for the next day. The sounds in my head were not the crack, crack, crack of three bullets, but the chop, chop, chop, drip, drip, drip of the man severing heads of chickens, and them dropping into the dirty street, one by one.

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
by Mark Twain

Excerpt from Chapter 12:

Mornings, before daylight, I slipped into corn-fields and borrowed a watermelon, or a mushmelon, or a punkin, or some new corn, or things of that kind. Pap always said it warn’t no harm to borrow things, if you was meaning to pay them back, some time; but the widow said it warn’t anything but a soft name for stealing, and no decent body would do it. Jim said he reckoned the widow was partly right and pap was partly right; so the best way would be for us to pick out two or three things from the list and say we wouldn’t borrow them any more – then he reckoned it wouldn’t be no harm to borrow the others. So we talked it over all one night, drifting along down the river, trying to make up our minds whether to drop the watermelons, or the cantelopes, or the mushmelons, or what. But towards daylight we got it all settled satisfactory, and concluded to drop crab-apples and p’simmons. We weren’t feeling just right before that, but it was all comfortable now. I was glad the way it came out, too, because crab-apples ain’t ever good, and the p’simmons wouldn’t be ripe for two or three months yet.

5. Tasks

Task 1: Write a paragraph using the first person. It can be fiction or non-fiction, but should include thoughts and actions.
Task 2: Construct a scene with multiple characters, but told through first person narration.