Description should be easy, and it is. However, there is nothing inherently easy about writing because writing can always be better than it is. Literacy is a process not a product. As a lesson about the power of description, try this:
Take a magazine picture and set it down in front of you (later tape it to the back of the front cover). Look long and hard at the picture. Make a list of everything you see. Try to be as complete as possible; be exhaustive. Now look at your list. First examine the words themselves. Did you use judgmental words, especially words that state judgements but which are not admitted to be personal judgements? Such words as "good, beautiful, handsome, pretty" etc. are often used uncritically; we use them assuming that they are universally true but they really express our personal or societal beliefs.Next look at your list to see if there is any pattern revealed. Where did you start with your list? At the top, bottom, left or right side? Is there any order revealed in how you made your list?
Now, suppose you wrote a brief descriptive essay in which you account as best you can for exactly what you see when you look at the picture. Would someone, say a very good artist, be able to paint that picture from your description?
Descriptions have a thesis, a main idea, a dominant point. Descriptions have IMAGES. IMAGES have power. IMAGES tell stories. When writing description, remember smells — smells are memory. Smell take us back, even against our will, to events that were important to us in the past; certain smells make them important to us in the present. Don't expect there to be any obvious connection between the image and the event. Memory doesn't operate according to the rules of reason.
As it turns out, smell and taste are singularly strong memory triggers. The perfume industry capitalizes on the powerful proximity of the smell and taste receptors to the hippocampus. So does the food industry, which emphasizes the nostalgia value of all sorts of products from homemade-style soups to over-fresh chocolate chip cookies. And so do the art. The French novelist Marcel Proust attributes the inspiration for his masterpiece Remembrance of Things Past to the aroma and taste of a madeleine tea cake, which instantly carries him back to his boyhood in Cambray. The implication seems to be that if you yearn to take a sentimental journey, follow your nose!— Jack Maguire, Care and Feeding of the Brain, New York: Doubleday, 1990
When you write your description paper, your first inclination will probably be to concentrate on visual description. This is to be expected; most of what we call knowledge we gather from sight. The language of seeing is often synonymous with the language of knowing. "Don't you see?" means "Don't you know?" "Could you shed some light on that?" But each sense has its special quality. Smell seems to be most intimate to memory. Try a description based primarily on smell and you will try to reclaim parts of your own self — and that is what writing is good at doing, making us more complete.
The rooms of the lost house, the corridors, the cellar and the attic are retreats for faithful odors, odors which the dreamer knows belong only to him: "Our childhood perpetuates a velvet perfume."If everyone just looks a bit, he will find the odor of a spring bud in his memory. For me the fragrance of springtime was in the poplar bud.
— Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Reverie, Boston: Beacon, 1971
A large part of this course is based on the fact that writing, especially the kind of writing we do in this course, has a predictable structure. It is a simple structure, but it is one that allows endless variations. To describe well, you need also take into account the structure of what you are describing, whether that something be a natural object or a contrived one, such as something written.
| All essays have a Beginning, a Body, and a Conclusion.
Each of these three parts has distinct qualities. You will write better the more you can utilize these qualities. |
To help you better understand beginnings and conclusions, you are to find a total of SIX examples from newspapers and magazines of six different kinds of ways that writers open their essays.
Below are two beginning techniques used in a daily newspaper, The Dayton [Ohio] Daily News. I have provided brief comments that illustrate what you need to do with your examples. Put each of the six examples on separate sheets of paper along with your comments, written similar to how I have done mine.
Your analysis depends on your being able to identify different kinds of opening and closing techniques. There are many different ways to begin an essay, but each one is designed to get the readers' attention. When we write, it is easy to forget that there is a reader and that the reader has no obligation to read what we write. We have an obligation to get the reader interested. Good writers keep this awareness in mind while writing, especially when writing the Introduction. The Introduction's main function is to attract a reader. Without a reader, what is the point of writing?
Throughout the history of writing several introductory techniques have been found to work: they get the readers' attention. These are FORMAL techniques; they work independently of the content of the writing. Below is a list of proven introductory techniques. Use this list to analyze the writers' techniques you find in newspapers and magazines.
Beginnings are Everything
There are many ways to begin an essay, but there are not very, very many. We begin in ways that are familiar to the reader, but we begin in ways that are not too overly familiar. Variety and familiarity, this is what we expect in all of our writing, especially in the way we write introductions.
The suggestions listed below are "tried and true." They work. And they also are infinitely expandable because they are not determined by content. They are formal techniques. Use one of these forms, but use your own content. If you don't believe that these techniques work, examine an essay that you like and see if the writer does not use one of the techniques listed below. And if the writer doesn't, what technique is being used? Add it to the list.
1) Tell a story. Begin your essay with a short story. Everyone loves a story. Once upon a time ....
2) Open with a question. A question demands an answer. It matters little what the question is, if you ask it, the person you ask will try to answer. In writing, it is the reader who will try, and by making that attempt the reader has entered into your writing. Now you have to keep the reader interested.
3) Use a quotation. A quotation is usually a good beginning because you have chosen the quoted material just because it is important to your story; therefore, the reader will also probably find it important. The reader may also recognize the quote and feel comfortable about it, sharing some of your insight. This is why politicians use quotes all of the time in their speeches.
4) Use an outrageous statement. The reader will probably not agree with the statement, but at least you have gotten the reader's attention. After that you can qualify your statement.
5) Use facts. There is something about facts that appeal to most readers. We live in an "Information Age." If the facts are especially startling, then you have an even stronger grip on the reader's attention.
6) State your main point, your thesis. Sometimes it is best to just come right out with what it is you are concerned with. Most people admire directness.
7) Use an anecdote, even if you don't agree with it, usually if you don't agree with it.
8) Begin with a dramatic scene. Drama means conflict, and conflict gets our interest.
9) Begin with a descriptive scene. Descriptive detail acts like a photograph. It appeals to us. This is why magazines use photographs to attract our attention.
10) Start with dialogue. Dialogue is the way we get the human voice into our papers.
(Sample newspaper articles)
METHOD ONE:
| This writer, John Smith, opens his article
("Mad River stocking a memory") with a question directed at the readers he
knows are already interested in trout fishing. When he writes, "How many
can …" he directly addresses the reader, expecting that the reader will
agree with the conclusion he later arrives at which is that we need to restock
the Ohio streams with trout.
(Dayton Daily News, B 10, Dec. 28, 1991) |
Mad River stocking a memory
How many can remember the old days when big breeder trout from the state's London, Ohio fish hatchery were stocked in the Mad River? The Division of Wildlife did this to prepare its fish hatchery for a new generation of breeding trout and to provide fishing in one of the few trout streams in Ohio. Some would say those were the good old days. I think they were. The fishing that resulted form this project was exciting, and it took place at a time of year when fishing was declining elsewhere in Ohio.
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METHOD TWO:
| Tom Teepen, a writer for the Dayton Daily News (A 1, Jan. 6, 1992), begins "Voodoo Economics" with a startling assertion in order to get the readers' attention. When he writes that "Actually, George Bush isn't crazy" we know that he knows that most readers, whether they like Bush or not, are going to keep reading. He also uses this assertion to develop his thesis: Bush is trapped by policies he backed for eight years as vice-president which he called "voodoo economics" when he was campaigning against Reagan in the Republican primaries ten years ago. I think this is an effective beginning since it is almost guaranteed to get the readers' attention. | Voodoo Economics
Actually, George Bush isn't crazy. He's just acting that way, continuing to deny there is a recession — and to deny it with increasing vehemence, as if believing furiously might make it so. The act sometimes may make it seem the president has slipped his moorings and is drifting out on the Goof Sea. But after its fashion, Mr. Bush's performance is coldly rational. If the president admits there is a recession, in fact one so mean it ate its own recovery aborning last spring, he would be expected to try to push the economy out of it.
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