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Vivid description creates an intense, distinctive image, one that seems to bring words to life. Good description can also be evocative, calling up memories or suggesting feelings associated with the subject being described. Writers use description to give readers an impression of people and places, to illustrate abstract ideas, to make information memorable, and to support an argument. This chapter presents the three basic descriptive techniques of naming, detailing, and comparing; it surveys the words writers typically use to evoke vivid sense impressions; it examines how writers use description to create a dominant impression; and it provides some sentence strategies you might use to get started drafting a description.

Naming

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, and a laptop. 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 that contributes to vivid descriptions:

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