A detail is any specific, concrete piece of information — a fact, a bit of the historical record, your own observation. Details make scenes and images more realistic and vivid for readers. They also back up generalizations, convincing readers that the writer can make broad assertions with authority.
Mary Harris “Mother” Jones told the story of her life as a labor organizer in The Autobiography of Mother Jones (1925; Chicago: Kerr, 1980). She lends conviction to her generalization about a nineteenth-century coal miner’s lot with ample evidence from her own experience and observations.
Mining at its best is wretched work, and the life and surroundings of the miner are hard and ugly. His work is down in the black depths of the earth. He works alone in a drift. There can be little friendly companionship as there is in the factory; as there is among men who build bridges and houses, working together in groups. The work is dirty. Coal dust grinds itself into the skin, never to be removed. The miner must stoop as he works in the drift. He becomes bent like a gnome.
His work is utterly fatiguing. Muscles and bones ache. His lungs breathe coal dust and the strange, damp air of places that are never filled with sunlight. His house is a poor makeshift and there is little to encourage him to make it attractive. The company owns the ground it stands on, and the miner feels the precariousness of his hold. Around his house is mud and slush. Great mounds of culm [the refuse left after coal is screened], black and sullen, surround him. His children are perpetually grimy from playing on the culm mounds. The wife struggles with dirt, with inadequate water supply, with small wages, with overcrowded shacks.
Although Mother Jones, not a learned writer, relies on short, simple sentences, her writing is clear and powerful because of the specific details she uses. Her opening states two generalizations: (1) “Mining … is wretched work,” and (2) the miner’s “life and surroundings” are “hard and ugly.” She supports these with a barrage of factual evidence and detail, including well-chosen verbs: “Coal dust grinds itself into the skin.” The result is a moving, convincingly detailed portrait of the miner and his family.
In Lipstick Jihad: A Memoir of Growing Up Iranian in America and American in Iran (New York: Public Affairs, 2005), Azadeh Moaveni uses details to evoke the “drama and magic” of a childhood visit to Iran.
To my five-year-old suburban American sensibilities, exposed to nothing more mystical than the Smurfs, Iran was suffused with drama and magic. After Friday lunch at my grandfather’s, once the last plates of sliced cantaloupe were cleared away, everyone retired to the bedrooms to nap. Inevitably there was a willing aunt or cousin on hand to scratch my back as I fell asleep. Unused to the siesta ritual, I woke up after half an hour to find the bed I was sharing with my cousin swathed in a tower of creamy gauze that stretched high up to the ceiling. “Wake up,” I nudged him, “we’re surrounded!” “It’s for the mosquitoes, khareh, ass, go back to sleep.” To me it was like a fairy tale, and I peered through the netting to the living room, to the table heaped with plump dates and the dense, aromatic baklava we would nibble on later with tea. The day before I had helped my grandmother, Razi joon, make ash-e gooshvareh, “earring stew”; we made hoops out of the fresh pasta, and dropped them into the vat of simmering herbs and lamb. Here even the ordinary had charm, even the names of stews.
To guide readers through her details, Moaveni uses transitions — chronological (After Friday lunch, after half an hour, The day before), spatial (through the netting to the living room), and thematic (To me it was like a fairy tale).
See more on transitions.
Quite different from Moaveni’s personal, descriptive details are Guy Garcia’s objective facts in “Influencing America” (Time 13 Aug. 2005). Garcia heaps up statistical details to substantiate his claim that Hispanics are “helping to define” mainstream America even though they face “prejudice and enormous social and economic hurdles.”
Nearly a quarter of all Latinos live in poverty; the high school drop out rate for Latino youths between the ages of sixteen and nineteen is 21 percent — more than triple that of non-Hispanic whites. Neo-nativists like Pat Buchanan and Samuel Huntington still argue that the “tsunami” of non–English speakers from Latin America will destroy everything that America stands for. Never mind that most Hispanics are religious, family-centric, enterprising, and patriotic. In the Time poll, 72 percent said they considered moral issues such as abortion and issues of faith important or very important. This year the government announced that undocumented workers were pouring billions into Social Security and Medicare for benefits that they would never be allowed to claim. Of the 27,000 troops serving in the U.S. armed forces who are not U.S. citizens, a large percentage are from Mexico and the rest of Latin America.
For more on observing a scene, see Ch. 5.
Providing details is a simple yet effective way to develop ideas. All it takes is close attention and precise wording to communicate details to readers. What would they see, hear, smell, or feel on the scene? Would a bit of reading or research turn up just the right fact or statistic? Effective details must have a specific purpose: to make your images more evocative or your point more convincing as they support — in some way — your main idea.