Point of view, or POV, is a thing which vexes us authors. I'm not going to go into all the subtleties of it, because it's a thing which extends well beyond line editing. But I am going to talk about some little words that weaken your POV. Before that, though, let's remind ourselves about what it actually means to have a point of view.

The points of view are named for the types of pronoun they use to describe the main character. A first person POV uses 'I' and 'me'. In this POV, you're directly in the head of the protagonist. (I read a weird blog which claimed that using 'we' and 'us' is called 'fourth person'. I would call that 'first person plural' but what do I know?) We all know this POV. I've heard various passionate arguments for and against it, I have no opinions... But whatever, we're line editing now, so you made that decision when you wrote your first draft.

Second person is for when you write one of those game books that were cool in the eighties, like Choose Your Own Adventure or Fighting Fantasy (or if you want to be a real hipster about it, Lone Wolf, which was absolutely the best of the bunch). YOU are the hero. You walk into a room and fall down a pit, you are dead, go back to paragraph one. Mechanically these are somewhere between third and first, but I won't dwell on it too much, because I doubt you're writing such a thing (or a postmodernist classic like If on a winter's night a traveller, which also uses second person).

Third person is the workhorse of fiction. However, there are two main types here: third person limited, and third person omniscient. In limited, you're stuck to a particular character, hence the name. This is absolutely the norm for most commercial fiction. In omniscient, however, you are everywhere; you can see all. This isn't used so much. Stuff written in this mode tends to read like a fairy tale; you flit between events and people and places, without preferring anything.

Within third person limited, you can decide how close you are to the mind of the character you're following. A very close third person limited might not use 'thought' tags, or even italics for thoughts: the character's direct experiences will leak into the text, almost like first person. A more distant third limited might not show inner thoughts at all. (Remember how I said that 'thought' was complicated in the filtering chapter? Yeah, this is it.)

The convention is to maintain the same point of view until you get to a chapter or section break. This is a convention, but it's a very well-kept one. Even books with complicated POV setups respect this. When we don't, the term we use is 'breaking POV'. The classic way that we break POV is so-called 'head-hopping' which is when we accidentally jump into the thoughts of a character who isn't the focus of this section.

You knew all this though, right? What you might not know are the weird ways that we can micro-break POV. And they are fixed with our favourite tool... (holds laptop up in fantasy power pose, streams of red lighting flow into it, massive explosion, baddies are dispatched) ...LINE EDITING!

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So to the first rule: establish POV as soon as possible. For first and second that's pretty easy, you just have a sentence with 'I' or 'you' in it. For third limited, it's harder. In practical terms it means that one of the first sentences of a section should be in the POV of the focus character. I say 'one of'; you're fine sticking some omniscient description in there, but the first sentence dealing with a sentient being should be to do with your point of view character. It has been a long time since you last sampled my sparkling writing. Let's fix that with some examples!

The green clouds rolled down the brick mountain, stinking like rancid soup. Keller picked up his pogo stick, grimaced, and adjusted the fusion drive. It was go time.

Here's a pretty standard section start. I've established the setting, and then established the POV character. 'It was go time' is one of those weird little sentences you see all the time in fiction: it's not quite in POV but it's not quite out of it. It might be the narrator or the character thinking it, but it doesn't matter. OK, here's the next paragraph.

I hope we can make it to the nest in time, thought Mabel.

Wha-wha-wha-whaaaat? Why is Mabel thinking when we're in Keller's POV? It's because I broke the rule. It turns out, I was using Keller as a descriptive element, and I threw my reader out when they read it. (Yeah, and I just unreliable narratored you, how do you like them apples?)
It's easy to fix though. Just put some little action for Mabel to do, right from the get go.

The green clouds rolled down the brick mountain, stinking like rancid soup. Mabel strolled through the camp, mug in hand. She waved at Keller. He nodded back, then picked up his pogo stick, grimaced, and adjusted the fusion drive. It was go time.

Easy. Get your POV character doing something as soon as possible. By the way, I've seen an argument that this is one of the few times that filtering is desirable. If your character is really doing nothing and so you can't easily write them an action, then having them watch the beige sun rising above the dirty fog might be acceptable if it's establishing their POV. I'm not sure, but look, it's your book.
Next!

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The next is more subtle. It's when you get in someone's head by accident. This can happen in any of the point of views except for third omniscient. Here's my example for you.

The nuclear pogo stick whined and thudded as Mabel bounced up the artificial cliff, the rest of the team not far behind. Keller kept up a constant patter of obscenities over the com, terrified of the great drop below him. A nesting flock of jubjub birds gazed at the foolish human interlopers smugly, their pink feathers shivering in the breeze.

Can you see it? That's right: I broke POV twice. We're not in either Keller or the jubjub bird's heads so we can't tell if they are terrified or smug.

Yeah, that's kind of sad, isn't it? The tension of the situation partly derives from the interaction between the characters. As a result it's the sort of sentence that, unlike some of the other things we wrote, we will really miss if we cut it. I even used an adverb-as-art because birds can't really look smug and man I will be sore to lose that.

So we have three cures. The first is to leave it. I mean it! This gentle POV breaking is sometimes OK if it scores a point. But I think the key is 'sometimes'. Head-hopping is a real danger, and I'm definitely skirting around the edge of that spiked pit, particularly with Keller. But let's put vial that in our medicine bag, and look at the next option.

The second cure might be worse than the disease, and that's to use the most weaselly of weasel words: 'obviously'. Yes it's an adverb, and a nasty one too. But it absolutely gets us out of our predicament.

Keller kept up a constant patter of obscenities over the com, obviously terrified of the great drop below him.

Ew. And yet I have seen this done by best-selling authors who have sold enough books that if they wanted to they could bury me in donated copies. So I guess that makes it OK?
It's worth analysing why this is works, before we move on. What you're doing is a very clever little get out. Yes, I'm not in his head, but the narrator and Mabel can obviously see that he's obviously terrified because it's so obvious with all the obvious things that he's obviously doing, so it's Mabel's experience, and it's not head hopping OK?

And then it's worth analysing why this is bad: because I am absolutely telling not showing.
But. Friends. 'Obviously' is an adverb, and we have a rack of buzzsaws over there, in a box labelled 'fixes for adverbs'. So let's roll that out and root around in it, shall we? And that takes us to cure three.

If we were revising and we found 'obviously' and we were thinking about it as an adverb, we wouldn't just delete it without thinking about it. (Well, we would sometimes, but that gets us back to where we started, which isn't much help, so let's instead look deeper.) Remember the golden rule with adverbs. What weakness is it propping up? And in this case, it's weak direct speech. What weak direct speech is that, I hear you ask? Yeah, exactly. There is none. We'd summarized it and hadn't realised it, so let's actually show it and put it in.

'Oh, for all the fucks in the sky, we're a long way up...' muttered Keller over the open com channel.

So there's cure three for POV breakage. Instead of saying what's going on in their head, show it, through dialogue or action. And if you can't... Ask yourself how your narrator could know? For the birds, I think I would change it to this:

A nesting flock of jubjub birds gazed at them, their feathers shivering in the breeze.
Smug pink bastards, thought Mabel.

Is it better? I'm not so sure. Maybe I'd go back to option one, and put it back to how it was.

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Point of view is hard. To avoid ambiguity, establish it as early as possible in every new section with little actions from your POV character. Check for micro-POV breaks involving thoughts leaking from other characters heads. To fix you have three options. Don't bother, use a weasel word like 'obviously' or show, don't tell.

Tell me what you think in the comments so I don't have to break POV and guess!