Firsthand and Secondhand Accounts
Compare and contrast a firsthand account (autobiography, diary, letter) with a secondhand account (biography, textbook, news report) of the same event or topic, identifying differences in focus and information provided
What a learner can do afterwards
- Explain the difference between a firsthand account (written by someone who experienced the event) and a secondhand account (written by someone who researched it), using specific examples
- Compare a diary entry and a textbook passage about the same historical event, identifying what each account includes, omits, and emphasises
- Analyse how the perspective of the writer (participant vs observer/researcher) affects the information provided, the language used, and the overall tone
1 · Read
Think of a big event, like a shipwreck or a famous journey. If you lived through it and wrote about it afterward, that writing is called a firsthand account. If someone else studied it later, maybe by reading old letters or asking people who remember it, their writing is called a secondhand account.
A sailor named Tom kept a diary during a shipwreck. He wrote: 'The water was freezing and my hands could barely hold the rope.' Years later, a textbook described the same shipwreck: 'The ship sank in 1912, and about 700 people survived.' Tom's diary is a firsthand account, full of his own feelings and small details. The textbook is a secondhand account, built from many sources and focused on facts.
A firsthand account tells you what one person saw and felt, but it might miss the bigger picture, like how many people were affected everywhere else. A secondhand account pulls together facts from many places, so it gives you a wider view, but it usually leaves out small personal moments that only one person saw. Neither kind is automatically more true than the other. They answer different questions about the same event.
The words a writer picks often give the account away. Firsthand writing is full of I, me, my and we, because the writer is standing inside the story: 'I grabbed my coat and we ran for the door.' Secondhand writing usually names other people and tells what they said: 'The family grabbed their coats and ran, a police officer reported.' Watch out for one trick. If a report quotes somebody saying 'I was scared', that I belongs to the person being quoted, not to the writer, so the report is still secondhand.
When you read an account, ask yourself: did the writer experience this personally, or did they gather it from other sources? That question tells you whether you are reading a firsthand or a secondhand account.
A firsthand account comes from someone who lived the event, and a secondhand account comes from someone who researched it, so each one gives you different pieces of the story.
More to read
Analyzing multiple accounts of a subject | Guided practice
Imagine you just read your favorite athlete's autobiography. In it, he tells you about the hard training that led to his big win. Later, you watch a video of his famous race. You hear the crowd cheering and see the look on his face as he crosses the finish line. Both accounts tell the story of the same race, but each one shows something different. The autobiography lets you inside the athlete's private thoughts and feelings, because he lived it. The video was made by people who watched from outside, so it shows what the moment looked and sounded like to everyone else.
Comparing texts | Guided practice
Pretend your school starts requiring tap dancing classes. A news article on the front page of the school paper reports when and where the classes will happen, and it shares the principal's reason for the new rule. But in the opinion section, another writer claims the real reason is a secret plan to tire students out so they will be quieter at lunch. The two writers reported on the same event, yet their articles are very different. One sticks to the facts. The other shares an opinion. When you compare two accounts of the same thing, ask yourself: What facts does each one include? What does each one leave out? And what is each writer trying to make you think or feel?
Combining information from two sources | Guided practice
Why should you read more than one source on a topic? Because no single source can tell you everything. Different sources may focus on different parts of a topic or share different information. For example, one source about bears might tell you that bears eat both plants and meat. Another source might explain that bears sometimes attack humans to protect their food. When you read both, you understand bears better. To combine information, first figure out what the sources have in common. Then notice what each one adds that the other does not.
2 · Watch
به انگلیسیTake it off screen
Where it sits
Learn first
This opens up
Where this leads
24 questions wait behind this lesson, each with its answer explained. Every answer feeds the sky: stars light as they are learned, and dim when it is time to come back.