Description
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
Illustration: Laocoön and His Sons ("Clamores horrendos" detail), photo by Marie-Lan Nguyen.
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Description is a verbal representation of something.
It is used for transmitting a mental image.
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Description as a rhetorical mode
The purpose of description is to re-create, invent, or visually present a person, place, event, or action so that the reader may picture that which is being described. Descriptive writing may be found in the other rhetorical modes.
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Ekphrasis
Ekphrasis is the often dramatic description of a visual work of art. In ancient times it referred to a description of any thing, person, or experience. The word comes from the Greek ek and phrasis, 'out' and 'speak' respectively, verb ekphrazein, to proclaim or call an inanimate object by name.
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On the inadequecy of verbal descriptions
- "Hence it is that other writers have confined themselves to a verbal description of the plants; indeed some of them have not so much as described them even, but have contented themselves for the most part with a bare recital of their names." --Pliny the Elder in Naturalis Historia
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See also
- Anthropomorphism
- Cliche
- Ekphrasis
- Fiction writing
- Fiction-writing modes
- Indescribable
- Literary technique
- Metaphor
- Narratology
- Objectification
- Personification
- Point of view
- Purple prose
- Representation
- Rhetorical devices
- Rhetorical modes
- Simile
- Verisimilitude
- Word choice
- Writing
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Related topics
- Depiction
- Description vs prescription
- Thick description
- Glossary of shapes with metaphorical names
- A picture is worth a thousand words
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