Chapter ten summaries
Description lists the appearance, smell, mood, or other characteristics of something. Descriptive text might account the appearance of a person (he had blue eyes, a big nose, and curly brown hair), or the details of a location, or some other element that lets you immerse yourself into the story. Descriptive text adds the details that help you visualize the characters and events in your mind's eye. It — quite literally — describes a person, place, or thing. Narration is the act of giving an account. The narrator is the person or entity within a story that tells the story to the reader. The ability to describe something convincingly will serve a writer well in any kind of essay situation. The most important thing to remember is that your job as writer is to show, not tell. If you say that the tree is beautiful, your readers are put on the defensive: "Wait a minute," they think. "We'll be the judge of that! Show us a beautiful tree and we'll believe." Do not rely, then, on adjectives that attempt to characterize a thing's attributes. Lovely, exciting, interesting – these are all useful adjectives in casual speech or when we're pointing to something that is lovely, etc., but in careful writing they don't do much for us; in fact, they sound hollow. Let nouns and verbs do the work of description for you. With nouns, your readers will see; with verbs, they will feel. In the following paragraph, taken from George Orwell's famous anti-imperialist essay, "Shooting an Elephant," see how the act of shooting the elephant delivers immense emotional impact. What adjectives would you expect to find in a paragraph about an elephant? big? grey? Loud? Enormous? Do you find them here? Watch the verbs, instead. Notice, too, another truth about description: when time is fleeting, slow down the prose. See how long the few seconds of the shooting can take in this paragraph
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