Dear Geist,

Our creative non-fiction teacher assigned us to write a 500-word personal experience piece, with “minimal use of the first person.” And she wouldn’t elaborate. Really? Is this one of those exercises meant to tickle our right brain or something?

Dear Class,

or the “restricted first person,” whose presence is referred to very subtly. “As a rule,” they write, “not much about the narrator is revealed, including the narrator’s opinions.” We would quibble a bit with this last one—we think the choice of what to report and what to leave out speaks volumes about the narrator—but that’s just one more reason to keep the deliberate first person out of the spotlight.