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A small, puckish-looking man with round, heavy-lidded eyes, always with dark circles under them, and with fingers and teeth stained a deep yellow by nicotine, he had an engaging yuk-yuk of a laugh, and as he told stories he would swing back and forth in his swivel chair, rather like a child riding a hobby-horse.— Brendan Gill, Here at the New Yorker The height of the grass at Wimbledon is three-sixteenths of an inch. The mower that keeps it at that level is a sixteen-inch Ran- some Certes, which has a high-speed, precision-ground, ten- knife cylinder, makes a hundred cuts every thirty-six inches, costs forty-one pounds twelve and six, and hums with the high sound of a vacuum cleaner while it moves. —John McPhee, A Roomful of Hovings and Other Profiles The first of the two passages above pictures a man as a friend remembers him. The second describes a mower used on the grass tennis courts at Wimbledon as it might be seen and heard by any careful observer. The purposes of the two writers are quite different. Gill wants to pro duce a sketch in which his feeling for his subject comes through. McPhee wants to impress upon the reader the precision and professionalism with which the grounds- keeper at Wimbledon approaches the task of maintaining the courts for championship tennis. To achieve their different ends, they use the same means—concrete details and comparisons. Gill’s details give us the whole man (“small, puckish- looking”), the dominant feature of his face (“round, heavy lidded eyes.. . with dark circles under them”), his yellowed teeth and fingers, the sound of his laughter (“engaging yuk-yuk”), a characteristic movement (swinging “back and forth in his swivel chair”). McPhee’s details give us the exact height at which the grass is kept (“three-sixteenths of an inch”), the size and make of the mower, the kind of cylinder it has (“high-speed, precision-ground, ten- knife”), the number of cuts it makes per yard, its cost, and its sound. Each writer also uses a comparison: Gill’s friend swings in his chair “rather like a child riding a hobby horse”; McPhee’s mower hums “with the high sound of a vacuum cleaner.” Selecting Details Perhaps the most common weakness in descriptive writing is to rely on generalizations to do the work that should be done by details — to say no more, for instance, than “The park is not old, but it’s going slightly to seed.” When the same generalization is supported by the details that made it true for the writer, it becomes true for the reader too: The park is not old, but it’s going slightly to seed. Grass pushes through the concrete in some places, there’s graffiti on the hand ball courts and benches have boards missing. By the basketball court, some of the slats are broken on the bleachers, and the bolts of one of the baskets have been yanked loose, probably by a future pro practicing his sky-hook slam-dunk. — Al Harvin, New York Times The basis of all good description is close observation. To start with, you need a store of particulars to draw on. From these you select the ones that suit your purpose. De tails that fit one aim may not fit another. Read the description of an escaped criminal on a “Wanted” bulletin put out by the police, and imagine how the same fugitive might be described by a loving parent and by a frightened or embittered victim of his crime. If your purpose is to picture an object or a person or a place as any careful observer would see it, the details you choose will supply specific information about size, shape, weight, color, and so on. If your purpose is to have your audience experience the subject as you’ve experienced it — take your view of it— you might select different details, or you might use the same details but treat them differently, emphasizing some, subordinating others, and choosing modifying words and phrases that convey your mood or attitude or judgment. The objective “navy blue” of literal description could become a “drab” or a “depressing” or a “sturdy” or a “comforting” blue, depending on the way you saw it. If you want your reader to share your impression of your brother, try to capture the features that are unique to him, not those that apply equally well to most of his friends. If you want to catch the special flavor of an experience, don’t bother with the details that apply to whole classes of people or places — the shrill voices of small children, the bustle of shopping centers—but concentrate on what makes the particular person or place distinctive. On the other hand, for the kind of description that contributes to definition — what a human being is, what a Sioux encampment was—present details that characterize all human beings, all Sioux encampments. In choosing details, pay close attention to the rhetorical situation and be guided by your readers’ probable knowledge of your subject. If you’re describing your basset hound for an audience that doesn’t know a basset from a beagle, concentrate on details that apply to all bassets. If your audience already knows what bassets look like and how they act, concentrate on the characteristics that make your dog an individual among bassets. Arranging Details Once you’ve chosen your details, your next job is to arrange them so that readers will be able to see what you want them to see. In the description of the park that’s going to seed, the writer first calls attention to the cracked concrete, the graffiti on the walls of the handball courts, and the broken benches — things a casual visitor would notice in just glancing around. Then he focuses on the basketball court, its bleachers and one of its baskets, because his subject is the decline of one of the great launching pads for professional basketball stars. In this description there’s no need for the writer to establish a specific viewing point. But sometimes deciding where you are in relation to what you’re describing will help you settle on a logical progression of details and keep the scale of the description right — the relation of large elements to small, of more important to less important. In describing the block you live on, you might imagine your self standing across the street from your home and begin your description with the building on the corner to your left. In describing the statehouse, you could spot yourself at the foot of the steps leading to the front doors and arrange your details in vertical order, from the steps upward or from the dome of the building downward. The more complicated your physical point of view, the more necessary it’s to make sure you’re not losing or con fusing your readers. But indicate changes in position as unobtrusively as possible. No reader likes to be elbowed into place. In presenting the sights and sounds you experienced on a Sunday stroll in the park, you might keep a narrative thread running through your description: Coming out of my apartment building, I turned left and crossed the bridge into our city’s largest park... . Enjoying the sunshine, I walked about a mile west through crowds of picnickers to the hill in the center of the park, always the scene of the liveliest action... . After an hour or so I moved to a bench near the band- shell at the foot of the hill and waited for the open-air concert to start. In describing a large city or a stretch of country, you might decide to present it as seen from an automobile or a plane. Here the writer has hit upon a highly imaginative device — the flight of a seagull — to help him give a picture of a vast area, the Pacific Northwest: A seagull’s view of this region would start in the north, in the Strait of Georgia, which separates Canada’s Vancouver Island from the forested mainland. Flying south, with sedate Victoria at the tip of Vancouver Island in view from one side, and metropolitan Vancouver, B.C., on the other, the gull will wing down broad Puget Sound, where dotted islands, timbered to the shore lines, are connected by state-owned ferryboats ceaselessly criss crossing the Sound as if it were a street. The Sound is protected water, unlike the stormy ocean coast to the west. Beginning at Everett, the gull will be flying over a metropolitan complex that includes Seattle at its center, extends past Tacoma, and thins out at Olympia, whose gray capitol dome looms over the tide flats at the foot of Puget Sound. At this point the seagull had better don shoes, to travel down the farmlands and scrub timber of the Cowlitz Valley and arrive at the Columbia. Just beyond lies Port land, sitting busily astride a tributary of the Columbia, the Willamette. The Willamette Valley is where the American settlement of the Pacific Northwest began.—Thomas Griffith, Atlantic Dominant Impression Sometimes the purpose of your description will be to pre sent not a photograph of whatever you’re describing but a sketch that captures the features you want to emphasize and that creates a dominant impression. The writer of the paragraph about the rundown park made no attempt to cover the park in detail or to map out the relation of its parts. Instead, he chose details that stressed its seediness and arranged them so that they focused the reader’s attention on the neglected basketball court. As the following description shows, precise details about size, color, diet, and so forth can be coordinated with a writer’s personal reactions (“immense,” “grotesque and revolting,” “alarming”) to support the dominant impression conveyed in the “fabulous and ridiculous” of the first sentence. (Rhetorical situation: the book, well illustrated with photographs, is written by an expert naturalist for an audience of general readers.) From the section on sea elephants: Even a photograph cannot give a true picture of these fabulous and ridiculous creatures. Not only are they Immense, males growing to eighteen feet in length and as much as fifteen feet in girth, but this sex is adorned with an eighteen-inch trunk that normally flops down over the mouth but which is also connected with the nasal passages and can be inflated and raised almost straight up. Worse still, these animals are clothed in very short sparse greyish brown hair, which they moult once a year and in doing so not only lose their fur but also their whole outer skin; they are then bright pink and present the most grotesque and revolting appearance, especially when they lounge around on shore in great misshapen, heaving masses under a hot sun, moaning, groaning, gurgling and roaring. They live on cuttlefish, seaweed, and shellfish and are fairly agile in the water but spend a lot of time on land. The great bulls heave their immense bulk up gently sloping beaches and into the tussocky tall grass of the islands they most prefer and then go to sleep. Nothing is quite so alarming as to stumble up against one of these animals at such a time since they come “unstuck” with a veritable explosion and rise to full height, blowing and snorting. — Ivan T. Sanderson, Living Mammals of the World -- For Analysis and Writing 1. For your instructor, re-create in a paragraph of 150—200 words a recent encounter you had with yourself in the bath room mirror. Before you begin to write, choose a specific circumstance. Was it just before an early class, after a very late party, before an exam, before a vacation break, after a good night’s sleep, in the midst of an attack of flu? Don’t include this background in your paper. Your purpose is to make your reader understand what you saw and how you felt, not why you looked and felt as you did. Here’s one student’s response to the assignment: Bleak Beginning At 7:05 the echo of the alarm still throbs dully in my ears. I grasp the cold, white porcelain of the sink and stare at the face in the mirror, which stares blankly back, mealy-white and blurred, vacant green wall behind. Straggly, broth-colored hair hangs down around the face in wisps and tangles. The eyes are puffed and half-closed, blinking, trying to focus. Warm bed. Crawl back in, just for a minute. The face stares indecisively. The distant thunder of trucks echoes, magnified, throbbing in my head, fading into the undercurrent of traffic. My tongue moves leaden in my stale, dry mouth; air whistles faintly through my clogged nose. There’s time. Go back just for a minute. My whole body feels heavy, as if liquid cement had hardened in my veins overnight. Too late to go back. My hand gropes for the cold- water faucet. 2. Describe a place that has some special significance for you—the room you had when you were a child, the park you played In, the candy 8tore you patronized, the church you at tended or the beach or pool you went to in the summer. Select and arrange the details so that the reader will see the place clearly and also understand why you feel about it as you do. So far as possible, make the details do the job of telling the reader how you feel. (To make sure you haven’t relied too heavily on generalizations, read your first draft through, skip ping all the general statements. If the details don’t make you feel you’re there—in the place you’re describing— you need to replace some of your generalizations with particulars.) In a note at the beginning of the paper, identify the reader you have in mind and briefly define your relationship. It should be someone you want to share your feeling about the place, someone you can count on being a sympathetic audience. 3. Review Sanderson’s description of sea elephants. Write a description of a person or an animal in which precise physical details are coordinated with a personal reaction to produce a dominant impression. 4. Describe someone you know well, using only details of physical appearance and mannerisms and examples of typical behavior to convey personality and character. Don’t generalize at all. 5. Describe two houses or apartments you know well—your family’s home and the home of another, very different family. Select details that reflect the occupants’ personalities, habits, tastes, interests, values. Address your descriptions to an audience that doesn’t know either family. Don’t tell what the occupants are like. If you’ve chosen the right details, readers will get a clear picture of them. 6. Write two descriptions of the same thing, each for a different purpose. Example: Describe your desk or your bike. Make one account a “For Sale” paragraph to be posted on a bulletin board. Give particulars that will identify your desk or bike and tell a prospective buyer what he needs to know. Write the other account for a good friend. Describe the desk or bike in such a way that the friend will know how you feel about it and about the activity (intellectual/physical) that it represents to you. In the first passage your desk or bike is an object. In the second, make it a symbol—beat-up old friend, thing of beauty, comfort or curse, whatever. 7. You’re the editor of a school newspaper. The paragraph be low has been submitted for publication. You like it, but you’re not satisfied with the way the writer has expressed himself. So you rewrite the paragraph, keeping the central idea and feeling but improving the expression so that the thought and emotion will come through more clearly. Keep in mind that a good rewrite Is one that the author will recognize as an improvement. It will also, of course, meet the standards of edited written English. [No title. Supply one.] I had been here since September and not realized, or observed, or knew where I was. One overcast, snowy afternoon I saw for the first time the environment I was in. At first I detected how large the university really was. The high-rise dorms stood naked against the sky. The brick and glass structures were noticeably out of place. Then I realized there were no dogs, children, or old people. The thought of being in an environment where there was no birth or death hit me. I remembered growing up in the city where the children and dogs ran wild, the noise of cars, buses, and ambulances constantly clouded the air; and the old people were always visible. The university was full of people, young people, my age. On this afternoon I saw their faces. I detected a loneness, yet a happiness and on some a blankness. The awareness that I was away from home was projected on my face for the first time. I had been like a brick and glass structure lost in some remote area surrounded by enormous white covered mountains. I was conscious of a nakedness, a feeling I had not known before. The sensation of cold and the snowflakes manifested itself in and on my body. I experienced the pressure of the sky on the earth and I was caught in the middle, out of place with the real world. 8. Study the use of details in each of the following passages. Is the writer’s purpose to show you what he saw or to show you what any careful observer would see? In answering the question, define as precisely as you can what the writer is describing and the point of view from which he’s describing it. Then go on to analyze the hind of detail he uses to accomplish his purpose. a. Tuttle’s San Francisco studio (he has branches in Los Angeles and Fresno) is situated next to the Greyhound bus station in a district of cheap hotels and racetrack touts. The visitor climbs a long flight of stairs to a brightly lit lobby, the walls of which are covered with numbered examples of Tuttle’s tattoo designs, his “flash.” Just off the lobby, behind a railing, is an area that has somewhat the feeling of a barber shop, with chairs, mirrors, a sterilizer for tattoo needles, and containers for black, red, green, yellow, and blue India ink. Most of the tattooing is done there, but two private rooms with padded benches are avail able for working on the less public parts of the body, and for extensive jobs which might take up to five hours at a crack. Pervading the entire studio is the sharp, aseptic smell of surgical soap. — George Leonard, Atlantic b. Just then, I see a tall, powerfully built, khaki-colored young man in skintight shorts and nothing else, a leather belt wrapped around his waist like a bracelet, five or six necklaces around his neck, who has climbed a tree just behind the musicians. Holding one foot in the fork, he slowly stretches his other leg along the branch as he reaches up to the next branch and extends his arms along it until his entire body is stretched taut. Then he begins to flex and writhe to the beat, now and then extending one hand and moving it back and forth, like an exotic benediction. His eyes are as inward as the drummers’. His “dancing” is as dark and potent and on the edge. There is a hint of the jungle here as well as of the San Juan honky-tonks, a mixture of the primitive and the urban, of lust and fear.. . . —Theodore Solotaroff, New York Times Magazine c. For centuries Englishmen and others in temperate climates of Western Europe had been building their wooden houses (or houses with wooden frames) in a certain traditional manner. To insure strength and durability, the house was built on a sturdy frame of heavy timbers about a foot thick. These were held together by cutting down the end of one beam into a tongue (“tenon”), which was then fitted into a hole (“mortise”) in the adjoining beam. When there was a pull on the joint, the pieces were held by a wooden peg fitted into an auger hole through the joined timbers. This kind of construction was generally supposed to be the only proper way to build a house. It also required a great deal of skill: shaping tongues and grooves, boring auger holes, making wooden pegs, and finally fitting all these neatly together required the tools and training of a carpenter. — Daniel J. Boorstin, The Americans: The National Experience d. As he waded Out, his big right arm swung back and forth. Each circle of his arm inflated his chest. Each circle was faster and higher and longer until his arm became defiant and his chest breasted the sky. On shore we were sure, although we could see no line, that the air above him was singing with loops of line that never touched the water but got bigger and bigger each time they passed and sang. And we knew what was in his mind from the lengthening defiance of his arm. He was not going to let his fly touch any water close to shore where the small and middle-sized fish were. We knew from his arm and chest that all parts of him were saying, “No small one for the last one.” Everything was going into one big cast for one last big fish. — Norman Maclean, A River Runs Through It top of page Home Similar Articles |