Chapter 1. Description

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Description captures impressions of persons, places, objects, or ideas. It records what you see, hear, taste, touch, feel.
Description is probably the most basic task writers face. Whether you are writing a short story, a term paper, or a sales proposal, much of your success as a writer will depend on your ability to provide readers with detailed descriptions.

• A. Objective description focuses on facts, statistics, observable details. Textbooks, encyclopedias, training manuals, business reports, and government publications include objective description. Objective description avoids emotion, sensationalism, or subjective interpretation:
• UN aid officials report that the drought has exacerbated
（恶化
,
增剧
,
）
止，终止） the famine. Farms and cattle ranches
（ have failed. Food production has virtually
停 ceased. The death rate in refugee camps has increased
20% to 150 per day. Orphans have left the camps to beg for food from convoy
（ 护送） drivers bringing supplies from the coast.

• Objective description is best suited to academic, business, and professional writing. Although the writer may have an opinion, it is reflected by selecting factual details rather than using figurative language.
• Objective description avoids personalized judgments.
• Objective description is suited when you are writing as the agent as others, when your writing must reflect the ideas and observations of others.

• B. Subjective description is personal. It reflects the thoughts, feelings, mood of the writer. One writer may write a glowing description of Las
Vegas, marveling at the lights, the glamour, the grandeur. Another writer may decry the city's shallow glitz, tasteless opulence, and dedication to selfishness and greed. Rather than focusing on factual detail, subjective descriptions seeks to create powerful impressions:

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The once fertile （富饶，肥沃） valley is now a dusty moonscape （荒凉的风景） of dry riverbeds, broken earth, and skeletons. Hundreds of men and women die of thirst, hunger, and disease in the heat and dust of the hopeless refugee camps. Emaciated （瘦弱的） orphans wander along the highway, lifting bony, empty hands to passing drivers. Scarred by hunger and loss, their young faces are old with death.

• Subjective description is developed through careful selection of details and use of connotations.
• Subjective description is best suited to personal essays, reviews, and commentaries. It is often used in advertising to motivate consumers.
• To be effective, subjective description must use emotional appeals and images that readers will understand and appreciate.

• Writers often blend objective and subjective description to balance factual detail with the power of emotional impressions. Popular biographies, news magazines, and marketing materials often present a mix of fact and image. By blending objective and subjective elements, writers can provide readers with both logical and emotional appeals:

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Every six minutes someone dies of hunger and disease in the refugee camp. Drought has destroyed the people's ability to grow food. With only a cup of rice a day to sustain them, orphans have left the camp to beg along the highways. Unless you help, many of them will not survive more than a month.

• ·
Blended descriptions seek to enliven factual detail, to put a human face on statistics.
• ·
Blended descriptions generally avoid long blocks of dry facts or highly sensational images.
• ·
Blended descriptions are effective in reaching a mass audience.

• Description mainly deals with appearances and feelings . It is a picture in words of a person, a place, an object or a scene. The description of a person often includes his appearances and his character. The person is often described from head to foot, from outside to inside. A place usually includes the landscape, the inside view of a house or the social conditions or environment. A scene is like a shot or a still in a film: what a group of people are doing or telling each other, and what the relationship between them is.

• Descriptions of people are often found in police reports for chasing criminals and advertisements for missing children. Descriptions of faces, bodies, dresses, characteristics and habits are often included.
In describing a person, the writer should not merely give details of his appearance. He should try to reveal the person’s character, thoughts, and feelings, which may be shown in what the person does and says, or in how he behaves to others. And it’s important to grasp the characteristic features that distinguish him from all other people.

Passage a. Seeger had a head of lose, wavy brown hair hanging down to her waist at the back. She also had bangs over her forehead that almost hid her big blue eyes. The nose---not her best feature---was long and straight. She had a regular set of white teeth and was full-lipped.
• Passage b. Tom Black, aged sixty, is a farm labourer for all his life. With sunburned skin, wrinkled forehead, he is strongly built and broad shouldered with slightly bent back. He always dresses a worn-out jean suit, but on Sundays he would be in his ties, white collars, and the best man’s suit. P160

• Passage c. My mother, an ordinary middle-aged woman. I will never tell you her age because that’s her privacy. She will be very glad to have her name guessed for she is really an expert in make-up and clothes-choosing and that’s the reason why she looks pretty young. Housework is what she is also good at. In fact she can do a whopping deal of housework in a single day without even a break.
After that, our rooms will be shining just like newly painted ones.
Very often my father and I will be driven out of bed extremely early on Sunday to have our sheets washed. Partly because of her thyroid gland, Mama used to be peevish (
易怒的，暴躁的） , and she was even fond of quarrelling, which, she told me, could bring her some kind of joy! She has changed a lot since she found out that no one would be responsible except herself if she ruined her health by becoming angry. She also ate a lot of kelp to heal her thyroid gland （甲状腺） , which really worked. Unfortunately she is still a chatterbox now and
I am always the victim.

• In describing a place, we are presenting a picture or a sketch of the place to our readers. As in describing a person, in describing a place one should mainly write about the things that make it different from other places.

• As a picture should have its centremost image, a piece of descriptive writing should give a dominant impression to the readers. However, the dominant impression to the readers cannot form a description on its own. Details or examples should be used to illustrate the central idea. They make the central idea vivid and convincing.

• Passage 1
And there the pub
（酒馆） was .It
stood on the crown on the long hill ,straight ahead of them, a small red-brick house with out-buildings and a single chimney trailing out smoke against the strong white light which seemed to be thrown up by great reflectors from the hidden sea....
• Please read the samples in page17 of your textbook

• Descriptions of objects usually appear in advertisements so that goods can be sold, or something found. They also occur in reports about a new invention or discovery. To describe an object we have to depend on our senses, because we need to mention its size, shape, color, texture, taste, and smell. It is also necessary to tell how it is used if it is useful, and what part it plays in a person’s life if it is in some way related to him. But emphasis should be placed on only one aspect of the object, probably its most important characteristic.

Example
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•
A ladder is used to help people to reach the things high above.
A simple ladder is made of wood or bamboo with two shafts （轴，杆状物） and pieces of rungs （横档） . Shafts are cylindrical （圆柱状的） in shape, its length is the ladder’s length. The two shafts go parallel. Rungs are barshaped, usually about one third of a metre long and somewhat tapering at the two ends so that they can be fixed into the shafts’ hole. There are about a step’s distance between the rungs.
If you want to reach the things high or hang something on the wall, you just put the ladder against the wall, and climb up the ladder steps.

• A scene is like a shot or a still in a film: what a group of people are doing or telling each other, and what the relationship between them is. It usually consists of three basic factors: the setting, the people, and the actions. Again, the writer should try to create a dominant impression when describing a scene.

If you have many things to describe, or if you have many examples or details to present, you should choose the key-points.
• The choice of key-points depends on the purpose of writing.If the purpose is to impress the readers on the simple life of a certain professor,then you should say more about his simple clothes and plain diet…
• If you want to stress on his hard work and tireless zeal in teaching,that would be another picture.

Sometimes description is interwoven with a little narration.They will add colour to each other. Alice Thorne's The Story of Madame Curie
• Manya gazed out of her bedroom window and sighed. As far as the eye could see stretched the beet fields. Not a hill,not a tree broke the long flat line of brown plains. The only upright objects to be seen were the dirty redbrick factory with its belching chimney and the huts of the peasants who worked in the factory.
This had been Manya's view for a year now-ever since she had been hired as a governess to the children of the wealthy man who ran the sugar-beet farm.
"I never want to see another beet as long as I live.“ Manya thought,turning away from the window.

Analysis:
• The first paragraph is a description of the beet fields. From Manya's point of view, an unmistakable impression these few lines give is, the endless beet fields are monotonic and uninteresting. Then follows a little narration.
The girl was fed up with the best, actually she was fed up with the environment and her position as a governess in the farm owner's house.

•
Going Away to School
"Have a good first term,Rebecca.Try and be happy."
"Remember,this is a wonderful chance for you.And you'll soon make new friends."
"Yet ,Mum.Yes,Dad."
Rebecca's voice was flat. It was a Tuesday morning .Her trunk had been loaded into an empty compartment somewhere down the corridor. She had deliberately dodged the carriage reserved for newgirls.

• Decide from whose point of view you are going to describe, as well as the order, the key-point and the purpose of your description. The visitor has a different point of view of a park from the person who is in charge of the park. The former is interested in sightseeing while the latter the management or the improvement of it. Even among the visitors, people of different age groups or of different professions will have different opinions on the same scene.

• Although description is a basic writing task, it is challenging to write well. Too often descriptions end up being a list of details that create a static, lifeless portrait. There are a number of strategies you can use to make your description more interesting and effective:

• Instead of telling readers that your sister is stingy, show her in action:
• Original:
My sister is stingy. She watches and counts her money constantly. She will only buy something if it is on sale or if she can get a discount. She buys the cheapest items and constantly boasts how much money she saves, no matter how much her efforts inconvenience the family.

•
My sister is stingy. Although we live three blocks from Save-More Foods, she insists I drive her twelve miles to Daggerts every
Wednesday to benefit from "Double Coupon
Day." Rather than buy what we need, she consults her wad of coupons clipped from
Sunday's newspaper. No coupon, no purchase.
She will return with four boxes of discount cereal and no milk or two pounds of halfpriced sliced ham and no bread. Let someone else pay full price.

B. Add Action, Dialogue, And Brief Narratives
• You can bring life to a description of a person or a place by adding elements of narration:
•
The courtroom is a blend of nineteenth century wood and stained glass and twentyfirst century technology. The oak paneled walls still bear scars from a pipe bomb that exploded during the 1968 trial of two draft resisters. Portable bullet-proof glass shields, used during the trial of a high profile mob

• informant, now serve as bulletin boards.
Video and computer screens now flank the tables where once Clarence Darrow sat behind a stacks of law books. The bailiff's curt, choked "All Rise!" still has the ring of a
1910 train conductor.
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Even a description of landscape can be given a sense of life and movement by showing how the scene differs with the seasons or even changes in lighting.