Perspective

The perspective the author chooses is a first person informal one. She talks to the reader as if she is an old friend using language that is clear and seldom using big words. Even the footnotes she includes interpret statistics into common language.

Obviously, the author experiences each job firsthand, but her reports are not like a detailed, hard-hitting news report. Instead, she ignores specifics such as a person's facial features, the time of day an event occurs or the weather. She excludes information that has no relevance to her feelings about the job she is doing. In addition, her reports are general, giving an overview of experiences that actually took months to unfold. In this way, her perspective is personal and introspective.

Ehrenreich's perspective changes slightly from the introductory chapter to the first chapter. Initially, she imagines her biggest problem will be hiding her own intelligence and...