Descriptive Analysis
Descriptive Analyses of the Essays and Short Stories
Narration and Description
THE STRATEGIES
Although the narrative and descriptive essays are often given as separate assignments in composition courses, they are combined in this first section so that teachers can present expressive writing and still reserve time for the many forms of informative and argumentative writing. This choice is tricky because it confirms the folk wisdom about expressive writing and rhetorical difficulty. According to custom, students can write narratives first because they are already familiar with storytelling and can organize a personal experience according to simple chronology. Similarly, students can write descriptive essays early because they can use their senses to discover details that can then be arranged according to spatial patterns. Teachers can find considerable support for such conventional wisdom in their students’ writing, which often seems more fluent when it focuses on personal narrative or describes something familiar. But teachers are also aware that narration is not restricted to expressive writing—historical narratives are informative and persuasive—and that the best personal narratives require the sophisticated use of pacing and point of view. Similarly, they know that description includes technical descriptions that are almost exclusively informative and that the most effective personal descriptions depend on the deft selection of evocative and telling details. Combining the two strategies into one assignment has an internal logic. Most narratives (telling what happened) are fleshed out by description (showing what something looked and felt like). And most descriptions are propelled by a strong narrative line. You may want to examine these propositions by discussing the way the two methods are presented in the section introduction and illustrated by the sample paragraph. Like the lesson in Kingston’s paragraph, events occur in time and space. Thus, writers must
Narration and Description
THE STRATEGIES
Although the narrative and descriptive essays are often given as separate assignments in composition courses, they are combined in this first section so that teachers can present expressive writing and still reserve time for the many forms of informative and argumentative writing. This choice is tricky because it confirms the folk wisdom about expressive writing and rhetorical difficulty. According to custom, students can write narratives first because they are already familiar with storytelling and can organize a personal experience according to simple chronology. Similarly, students can write descriptive essays early because they can use their senses to discover details that can then be arranged according to spatial patterns. Teachers can find considerable support for such conventional wisdom in their students’ writing, which often seems more fluent when it focuses on personal narrative or describes something familiar. But teachers are also aware that narration is not restricted to expressive writing—historical narratives are informative and persuasive—and that the best personal narratives require the sophisticated use of pacing and point of view. Similarly, they know that description includes technical descriptions that are almost exclusively informative and that the most effective personal descriptions depend on the deft selection of evocative and telling details. Combining the two strategies into one assignment has an internal logic. Most narratives (telling what happened) are fleshed out by description (showing what something looked and felt like). And most descriptions are propelled by a strong narrative line. You may want to examine these propositions by discussing the way the two methods are presented in the section introduction and illustrated by the sample paragraph. Like the lesson in Kingston’s paragraph, events occur in time and space. Thus, writers must