1. Purpose - what you are going to teach the reader that they did not already know?
2. Audience - Whom are you writing to?
Always remember-you can't write what you do not know about. Find the tie to the topic; otherwise you force yourself into an impossible situation. If you write about a topic because you think your audience/teacher will like it, you will have nothing new or innovative to say on the topic. If, on the other hand, you find your connection with the topic, you will pleasantly surprise your audience/teacher-and that is always good.
Think what was my first response to the event: What did I think? How did I feel? What did I do? How did I show my feelings? What did I want those present to think of me and why? What did I think of myself at the time? Did I talk to anyone just after the event? What did I say? How long did these first feelings last? What were the immediate consequences of the event for me personally?
How do I feel about the way I acted at the time of the event? Was my response appropriate? Why or why not? What do my actions at the time of the event say about the kind of person I was then? How would I respond to the same event if it occurred today?
Remember the five senses. List important features: pretend that you are once again at the scene; make a list of any significant features or objects that you remember.
Describe important features: choose at least three items from you list and write for about five minutes on each one. Try to remember and record specific sensory details: size, shape, color, texture, side view, sounds, smells. Does it remind you of something else? Would you compare it with anything else?
List significant people.
Describe significant people: choose one or more persons from your list who played a central role. Write about each person for about five minutes; describe the person's appearance and actions, and state his or her significance. Recreate conversations: set up a dialogue.
Beginning: catch the reader's interest by creating a mystery, using catchy dialogue, developing a compelling moment or scene. Decide which information I give first; should I begin with the main event or background information? Should I present myself first? Telling the story: What are the high points of my narrative and how can I emphasize them-remember to keep my purpose in mind: I don't need to tell everything, just the parts that help the reader understand my purpose. How can I integrate details of the scene, objects, and people smoothly into the narrative? How can I let actions and conversations carry the narrative? In this section, I must keep the reader thinking. Ending: How should the essay end; should I continue the narrative to the end or should I reflect on the meaning of the experience? Can I tie my end to the beginning scene. Would it be good to jolt the reader with something unexpected? No matter what I do, I must make my ending so important that the reader will continue to think about my narrative long after he or she finishes the reading.
One way of dramatizing narrative action is dialogue. Writers use it to reveal conflict directly, without the narrator's intruding commentary. Dialogues are not mere recordings of conversations, but pointed representations and motives of the characters (it is the writer's way of slipping a note to the reader under the table). Through dialogue, readers gain insight into the personality and motives of the characters. Through dialogue, Richard Wright shows what happened when a white man confronted a black delivery boy. Notice that the dialogue does not have the free give-and-take of conversation. Instead, it is a series of questions that get evasive answers: "he said" or "I lied" or "he asked me." The dialogue is tense, revealing the extent of the boy's fear and defensiveness.
"I was hungry and he knew it; but he was a white man and I felt that if I told him I was hungry I would have been revealing something shameful.
'Boy, I can see hunger in your face and eyes,' he said.
'I get enough to eat,' I lied.
'Then why do you keep so thin?' he asked me.
'Well, I suppose I'm just that way, naturally,' I lied.
'You're just scared, boy,' he said.
'Oh, no, sir,' I lied again.
I could not look at him. I wanted to leave the counter, yet he was a white man and I had learned not to walk abruptly away from a white man when he was talking to me. I stood, my eyes looking away. He ran his hand into his pocket and pulled out a dollar bill.
'Here, take this dollar and yourself some food,' he said.
'No, sir,' I said.
'Don't be a fool,' he said. 'You're ashamed to take it. God, boy, don't let a thing like that stop you from taking a dollar and eating.'
The more he talked the more it became impossible for me to take the dollar. I wanted it, but I could not look at it. I wanted to speak, but I could not move my tongue. I wanted him to leave me alone. He frightened me.
'Say something,' he said. (Richard Wright, Black Boy).
Wright does not try to communicate everything through dialogue. He intersperses information, which supports the dialogue-description, reports of the boy's thoughts and feelings, as well as some movement-in order to help readers understand the unfolding drama.
Writers also use dialogue to reveal a person's character and show the dynamics of interpersonal relationships. Notice, for example, the way Lillian Hellman uses dialogue to write about a long-time friend, Arthur W.A. Cowan:
Cowan said, "What's the matter with you? You haven't said a word for an hour." I said nothing was the matter, not wishing to hear his lecture about what was. After an hour of nagging, and the repetition of "Spit it out," Spit it out," I told him about a German who had fought in the International Brigade in the Spanish civil War, had been badly wounded, and was now very ill in Paris without any money and that I had sent some, but not enough.
Arthur screamed, "Since when do you have enough money to send anybody a can to piss in? Hereafter, I handle all your money and you send nobody anything. And a man who fought in Spain has to be an ass Comie and should take his punishment."
I said, "Oh shut up, Arthur." And he did, but that night as he paid the dinner with a check and handed me the change. It was a thousand dollars. I said, "What's this for?" "Anybody you want." I handed it back.
He said, "Oh for Christ sake take it and tell yourself it's for putting up with me." "Then it's not enough money." He laughed. " I like you sometimes. Give it to the stinking German and don't say where it comes from because no man wants money from a stranger." Lillian Hellman, Pentimento
This dialogue is quite realistic. It shows the way people talk to one another, the rhythms of interactive speech and its silences. But the dialogue does something more: it gives readers real insight into the way Hellman and Cowan were with each other, their conflicts and their shared understanding. Such dialogue allows readers to listen in on private conversations.
The Hellman passage also exemplifies two methods of presenting dialogue: quoting and summarizing. In summarizing, writers choose their own words instead of quoting actual words used; this allows them to condense dialogue as well as to emphasize what they wish. When Hellman writes "I told him about a German" she is summarizing her actual spoken words.
To describe, writers point to and name objects or features of their senses tell them. Describing involves three basic strategies: naming, detailing, and comparing.
To describe, writers point to and name objects or features of their subjects. In looking for the right word to name something , writers can usually choose from a variety of words. Some words may be concrete (referring to ideas or qualities). "Nose, tooth, and foot" are concrete words, whereas "love, faith and justice are abstract. Annie Dillard identifies the face, chin, fur, underside, and eyes of a weasel she once 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
The underscored nouns name the parts of the weasel on which Dillard focuses her attention. The nouns she uses are concrete: They refer to actual tangible parts of the animal. They are also fairly specific: they identify parts of one particular animal, the weasel she saw. In addition to naming perceivable objects and features, writers name sensations (stink and plunk ) and qualities ( the sweetness of the lumber):
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 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 stinkof 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
Although nouns can be quite specific, detailing is a way of adding more specificity to them, thus making description even more particular and precise. Naming answers the questions" What is it? and "What are its parts or features?" Detailing answers questions these: What size is it? How many are there? What is it made of? Where is it located? What is its condition? What is its use? Where does it come from? What is its effect? What is its value? To add details to names, add modifiers-adjectives and adverbs, phrases and clauses.
Whereas naming and detailing call on the power of observation, comparing brings the imagination into play. Comparison makes language even more precise and description more evocative. The following passages illustrate two kinds of comparison: simile and metaphor. Both figures of speech compare things that are essentially dissimilar. A simile directly expresses a similarity by using the word "like" or "as" to announce the comparison. Dillard uses a simile when she writes that the weasel was " "thin as a curve." A metaphor, on the other hand, is an implicit comparison by which one thing is described as though it were the other. Dillard uses a metaphor when she describes the weasel as 'a muscled ribbon."
Sometimes I rambled to pine groves, standing like temples, or like fleets at sea full rigged, with wavy bough, and rippling with light. Henry David Thoreau, Walden
Just below the path, raising their heads above the endless white crosses of a soldier's cemetery, were strange red flowers. Alfred Kazin, A Walker in the City
When using description, you should remember the five senses.
Onomatopoeia is the term for names of sounds that echo the sounds themselves: squaek, murmur, hiss, boom, tinkle, twang, jangle, rasp. Sometimes writers make up words like plink, chirr, sweesh-crack-boom, and cara-wong to imitate sounds they wish to describe.
At first a faint sighing, like wind in the tops of distant trees. Then the birth of another sound within the sigh, a sharper sound, very faint but growing steadily, a kind of whine, first heard as a pinpoint in the higher registers, building rapidly to a full hum across the spectrum, growing louder and louder, and then (at the very instant a shock wave of air slammed softly across my shoulders) overtaking the sigh, reversing itself, and plunging down the scale of a steady hum. I watched the black car racing away ahead of me. Frank Conroy, Stop-time
In addition to the word smell, only about ten commonly used nouns name this sensation: odor, scent, vapor, arona, fragrance, perfume, bouquet, stench, stink. Few words describe receiving or sending odors-smell, sniff, waft-but a fair number of detailing adjectives are available: redolent, pungent, aromatic, perfumed, stinking, must, rancid, putrid, rank, foul, acrid, sweet, and cloying.
The perfume of the flowers rushed into my brain. A lush aroma, thick with sweetness, thick as blood, and spiced with the clear acid of tropical greenary. My heart pounded like a drowning swimmer's as the perfume took me over, pouring into my lungs like ambrosial soup. Frank Conory, Stop-time
Writers describing the sense of touch tend not to name the sensation directly or even to report the act of feeling. Probably this omission occurs because only a few nouns and verbs name tactile sensations besides word like touch, feeling, tickle, brush, sting, scratch, itch, tingle. Nevertheless, a large stock of words describe temperature (hot, warm, tepid, cold, arctic). moisture content (wet, dry, sticky, oily, greasy, moist, papery, crisp), texture (gritty, silky, smooth, crinkled, coarse, soft, sharp, leathery), and weight (heavy, light, ponderous, buoyant, feathery).
The midmorning sun was deceitfully mild and the wind had no weight on my skin. Arkansas summer mornings have a feathering effect on stone reality. Maya Angelou, Gather Together in My Name
Other than taste, savor, and flavor, few words name the gustatory sensations directly. Certain words do distinguish among the four types of taste sweet (saccharine, sugary, cloying,); sour (acidic, tart); bitter (acrid, biting); salty (briny, brackish), while several other words describe specific tastes (piquant, spicy, pungent, peppery, savory, toothsome).
As I ate the oysters with their strong taste of the sea and their faint metallic taste that the cold wine washed away, leaving only the sea taste and the succulent texture, and as I drank their cold liquid from each shell and washed it down with the crispy taste of the wine, I lost the empty feeling and began to be happy and to make plans. Ernest Hemingway, A Moveable Feast
When people describe what they see, they identify the objects in their field of vision. As the following passage illustrates, these objects may include animate as well as inanimate things and their features. Details may range from words delineating appearances to those evaluating it.
As I sit at my window this summer afternoon, hawks are circling about my clearing; the tantivy of wild pigeons, flying by twos and threes thwart my view, or perching restless on the white pine boughs behind my house, give a voice to the air; a fish hawk dimples the glassy surface of the pond and brings up a fish; a mink steals out of the marsh before my door and seizes a frog by the shore; the sedge is bending under the weight of the reedbirds flitting higher and thither. Henry David Thoreau, Walden
In order to explain or support any ideas or assertions, writers need to move beyond generalities and provide readers with specific, detailed information. One way of doing this is through illustration. They help writers go beyond the simple statement of an idea to the reader. Two forms of illustration are: example and lists. An example is the basic form of illustration. Essentially it consists of a general statement with a few sentences of more detailed explanation and elaboration.
You get used to looking through lenses; it is an acquired skill. When you first look through binoculars for instance, you can't see a thing. You look at the inside of the barrel; you blink and watch your eyelashes; you play with the focus knob til one eye is purblind.
The microscope is even worse. You are supposed to keep both eyes open as you look through its single eyepiece. I spent my childhood in Pittsburgh trying to master this trick: seeing through one eye, with both eyes open. The microscope also teaches you to move your hands wrong, to shove the glass slide to the right if you are following a creature who is swimming off to the left-as if you were operating a tiller, or backing a trailer, or performing any other of those paradoxical maneuvers which require either sure instincts or a grasp of elementary physics, neither of which I posses. Annie Dillard, Teaching a Stone to Talk
Listing, a special form of illustration, is a writing strategy used in all types of writing. Listing involves simply the quick accumulation of specific examples without taking time to develop any of them. It looks easy, but choosing the items for the list can be tricky. They need to suggest the strange and variety of the scene or topic, and they need to create a single dominant impression.
The people, in their throngs, are the most varied we see-or that anyone is likely to see in one place west of Suez. This intersection is the hub if not the heart of Brooklyn, where numerous streets converge, and where Fourth Avenue comes plowing into the Flatbush-Atlantic plane. It is also a nexus of the race.
"Weigh these, please." Will you please weight these? Greeks. Italians. Russians. Finns. Haitians. Puerto Ricans. Nubians. Muslim women in veils of shocking pink. Sunnis in total black. Women in hiking shorts, with babies in their backpacks. Young Connecticut-looking pantssuit women. Their hair hangs long and as soft as silk. There are country Jamaicans, in loose dresses, bandannas tight around their heads. " Fifity cents? Yes, dahling. Come on be a sweetheart, mon." There are Jews by the minyan, Jews of all persuasions-white bearded, black-bearded, split-bearded Jews. Down off Park Slope and Cobble Hill come the neobohemians, out of the money and into the arts. "Will you weigh this tomato, please." And meantime let us discuss theatre, books, environmental impacts. Maybe half the crowd are men---men in cool Haspel cords and regimental ties, men in lipstick, men with blue eyelids. Corporate-echelon pinstripe men. Their silvered hair is perfect in coif; it appears to have been audited. Easygoing old neighborhood men with their shirts hanging open in the summer heat are walking galleries of abdominal and thoracic scars-Brooklyn Jewish Hospital's bastings tackings. (They do good work there.) John McPhee, Giving Good Weight
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