Naming

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For more on naming, see Chapter 2, 40–41.

Naming calls readers’ attention to observable features of the subject being described. To describe a room, for example, you might name objects you see as you look around, such as a bed, pillows, blankets, a dresser, clothes, books, a CD player, and CDs. These objects suggest what kind of room it is and begin to give readers an impression of what it is like to be in this particular room.

Look closely at the following passage describing a weasel that the writer, Annie Dillard, encountered in the woods:

He was ten inches long, thin as a curve, a muscled ribbon, brown as fruitwood, soft-furred, alert. His face was fierce, small and pointed as a lizard’s; he would have made a good arrowhead. There was just a dot of chin, maybe two brown hairs’ worth, and then the pure white fur began that spread down his underside. He had two black eyes I didn’t see, any more than you see a window.

—ANNIE DILLARD, Teaching a Stone to Talk

With these names, readers can begin to put together a mental image of the animal Dillard is describing. She uses simple, everyday nouns, like chin, to identify the weasel’s features, not technical words like maxilla or mandible. The piling up of simple, concrete nouns helps readers imagine what the weasel looked like to Dillard.

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Although writers most commonly name what they see, sight is not the only sense contributing to vivid descriptions, as in the following passage:

When the sun fell across the great white pile of the new Telephone Company building, you could smell the stucco burning as you passed; then some liquid sweetness that came to me from deep in the rings of the freshly cut lumber stacked in the yards, and the fresh plaster and paint on the brand-new storefronts. Rawness, sunshiny rawness down the end streets of the city, as I thought of them then—the hot ash-laden stink of the refuse dumps in my nostrils and the only sound at noon the resonant metal plunk of a tin can I kicked ahead of me as I went my way.

—ALFRED KAZIN, A Walker in the City

Kazin names smells, sounds, tastes, and tactile qualities.

EXERCISE 15.1

Go to a place where you can sit for a while and observe the scene. It might be a landscape or a cityscape, indoors or outdoors, crowded or solitary. For five minutes, list everything in the scene that you can name using nouns. (A simple way to test if a word is a noun is to see if you can put the word the, a, or an in front of it.) Remember, you can name objects you see (dog, hydrant) as well as impressions such as smells or sounds you experience at the place (stench, hiss).

Then write a page or so that describes the scene for someone who is not there with you. Write for readers who have never been to this particular place to let them know what to expect when they get there.

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EXERCISE 15.2

Turn to Annie Dillard’s “An American Childhood” in Chapter 2, pp. 18–19 . Read paragraphs 12 and 13, and underline the names that Dillard uses to describe the circuitous route she runs while the stranger is chasing her. Begin underlining with the words house, path, tree, and bank in the opening sentence. How do you think the amount of naming Dillard does contributes to the description’s vividness—measured by your ability to imagine the chase scene?

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