Sketching a scene: Description.

Description seems a lot harder than it actually is. Remember when you are writing to include all five senses - ears, nose, tongue, touch and feel, and, last, eyes. The more senses you employ, the better the description.

Why not skim through this list of suggestions until you find just one that fascinates you? Then use it for your first paragraph. The last thing I want to do is to confuse you or put you off writing! So KISS technology is the one to use.
Works every time.

Feelings...

Now then, instead of saying that his hands smelled of musk, or her scent reminded me of my mother, how about this for an idea to make your writing sparkle?
.
We have five ways of feeling: eyes, nose, ears, mouth, fingertips. Did you know?
So we smell coffee, we see things, we hear stuff, we taste breakfast, we touch brickwork.

What if we made it into a game?

What if we smelled taste?

He looked down at London, spread beneath him like a tasty pizza.

What if we saw smells?

She smelt of jungle (Chenua Ochebe).

What if we heard tastes?

The gilded notes of the Beethoven quartet tasted like vintage port.

What if we tasted sound?

The home made brandy tasted like the screech of tyres.

You have to have a bit of imagination...

She walked along the street like trumpet solo.
She glared at me like a glass of ice cold water being thrown in my face.
The wine-dark sea. (Homer)

For wimps:

His velvet voice entranced the old lady.
Her silken tones echoed round the chamber.
She had enjoyed her taste of honey. Now it was time to face the reality of her life.

Here is a helpful little table: just pick one adjective and write a merism of your very own, that sounds as fresh and tasty as new baked bread:

sight	touch
smell	taste
sound	smell
taste	sight
touch	sound

A Level students only:

This is called synaesthesia – as if you want to know. Greek - meaning joining feelings together.
Only trying to be helpful here: An-aesthesia means not feeling anything at all.
A scent brings back memories of a caress. A piece of music brings the smell of summer winds. The touch of rain on your face brings…
Here are some tools for you to use when writing a description.

Just let it pour out!

This is an old trick and it works every time:

Christmas. Lights on houses. Dark winter. Gloom. Smell of bonfires outside and log fires inside. Merry.

It works every time. Just spray the first things you think about onto the page without bothering about verbs, grammar or doing it right.

Everyone is at it.

Churchill:

In War: Resolution.
In Defeat: Defiance.
In Victory: Magnanimity.
In Peace: Good Will.

What a great description of the Second World War!

Dickens (of course) Bleak house:

London. Michaelmas term lately over, and the Lord Chancellor sitting in Lincoln's Inn Hall. Implacable November weather...as much mud on the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill.

Bit of a cheat here – two verbs – retired and would be.

Star Wars (of course): 

Space: the final frontier.

Advertisers love sketching a description:

Sketching - a great way to start off a speech, an essay, even an advert. Works even in exams:

Hitler. Jew hater. Tyrant. Orator. Vegetarian. Ruler of the world in his small mind…

Description through a list.

This is an extension of congeries (next subheading) – listing things.

Writing a description of somebody, of something? Then this a very good way of doing it: write a list.

Don't like it? List things you don't like.

I think this man (I do not want to dignify him with a name - oh all right then, Gabriel Harvey) had a bit of a problem with gender fluidity, but then he did write a long time ago in the 16th cenbtury:

Fie on all impure Ganymedes, Hermaphrodites, Neronists, Messalinists, Diodecomechanics, Caprisians, Inventors of new, or Revivers of old lecherists, and the whole brood of venerous libertines.

Nowadays most of these words cannot be used in public, so I can't translate them for you. But his virtue signalling from the time of Queen Elizabeth I makes a very good sentence! Do not try this today or the Police will be round you up for for hate crime.

The East German government was pretty good too:

Paralytic sycophants, effete betrayers of humanity, carrion-eating servile imitators, arch-cowards and collaborators, gang of woman-murderers degenerate rabble, parasitic traditionalists, playboy soldiers, conceited dandies.

Who is this? Well, it is us – the British in 1953. Luckily we have changed since then.

Nowadays on the net, people often just write lists:

The words you use should be immediate in their impact, and are more likely to be of Saxon origin, rather than Latin. For example:

Saxon	Latin
news	information
now	immediately
hurt	injured
eaten	digested

In addition, try to use terms that are vivid rather than hackneyed, for example:

Vivid	Hackneyed
love	like
hate	dislike
adore	love
deranged	mad

Of course, you can list things you love too:

Here is Charles Dickens:

The (Christmas) tree was planted in the middle of a great round table, and towered high above their heads. It was brilliantly lit by a multitude of little tapers; and everywhere sparkled and glittered with bright objects. There were rosy cheeked dolls, hiding behind green leaves; and there were real watches (with movable hands, at least, and an endless capacity of being wound up), dangling from innumerable twigs; there were French-polished tables, chairs, bedsteads, wardrobes, eight day clocks, and various other article of domestic furniture (wonderfully made, in tin, at Wolverhampton), perched among the boughs, as if in preparation for some fairy housekeeping, there were jolly, broad-faced little men...

That is about a third of his paragraph. Don't you just long to read the rest?

In sales list the advantages of your product to describe its usefulness.

With the help of GPS technology, the Internet can help map and direct you to almost every place in the world. You can quickly route to your location or find businesses in your area that may sell or provide you with a service you need. Today's search engines are also smart enough to know your location and help give you the most relevant searches for your area. For example, if you need a plumber and search for "plumber," you'll get a list of local plumbers in your area.

Describing your subject, whatever it is by listing either the best or the worst of it – or them – or him – or her – or even it, is one of the very best ways there is of talking about it to your readers, your customers, your enemies, your allies, even your clients . 

Congeries – making a silly list

Congeries simply means making a heap of words. And how very boring are the people who do this!

Like the man who rings up LBC and begins, “I have just four things to say, so I'll be quick...”

Or the keyboard warrior who is trying to prove some point or other. There follows a rambling list of ten or so bullet points with a paragraph on each one. (yawn).

What is a congeries?

Easy peasy: A congeries is a confused heap a clutter, a muddle, a mess, a confusion, a welter, a disarray, a disarrangement, a tangle of litter, a hodgepodge, a hotchpotch even, a mishmash, or, if you like, a miscellany, a motley collection, a mixture, a mixed bag, a medley, a farrago, a mash-up, a dog's dinner, (or even a dog's breakfast), maybe a gallimaufry, or a mingle-mangle, a macédoine…(Dictionary definition.)

Are you still reading? Have a merit mark!

But…

People who write lasting songs know all about congeries – long lists.

I am not going to give you a congeries with names like Uncle Tom Cobbley or the Twelve Days of Christmas. 

The good thing about congeries is that if you do it right it is quite funny. Try it for yourself and see.

Contrasts: Antithesis, a useful tool for descriptive writing.

When you are describing people or things, remember that contrasts matter.

How tall are you? Taller than your Dad? Smaller than your sister? 

How rich are you? As rich as Prince Andrew? Or Bill Gates? As poor as starvin' Marvin (South Park)?

By comparing things, we can judge them. Italian painters loved this one. Leonardo da Vinci made a point of contrasting colours, contrasting shades and contrasting people. Ugly against beautiful, dark against light. Here Leonardo contrasts the mouth and the eyes - both pointing in different directions.

So a couple of thoughts joined together forces us to compare. 

The well-bred contradict other people. The wise contradict themselves.
I cannot live with you. Nor without you.

Make a statement that is obvious: People like money. Then start off the same – with a twist. Politicians like other people's money.

Or Fat people need exercise. Obese people need …

Here are some clever examples and some stupid ones too:

Good women go to heaven. Wicked women go out clubbing.
Women represent the triumph of matter over mind; men represent the triumph of mind over morals.
Journalism is unreadable, but literature is not read.
Prisons, though always locked, are full: churches, though always open, are empty.

This is the formula: X is Y and not-X is not-Y.

Prisons are full: temples (not-prisons) are empty (not full).

Good women go to heaven; not-good women go to not-heaven (should be hell).

Charles Dickens riffed on this:

“Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pound ought and six, result misery.”― Charles Dickens, David Copperfield

You can make it even more simple:

Life is sweet: death is bitter. 

Virtue won't hurt you. But vice is nice.

 Naughty but nice…(Cream bun advert). 

Karl Marx spent his whole life on this one:

The bourgeois owns the present: the Working Class owns the future.

A time to be born and a time to die; a time to plant and a time to pick that which is planted...A time to embrace and a time to refrain from embracing. (The Bible: Ecclesiastes).

Here is the rest of the start of a Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens:

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going the other way.

Contrasts are used so much, that we often miss them completely: 

“We are outraged that Jeremy Corbyn, a life-long committed anti-racist, is being smeared as an anti-semite by people who should know better.” (The Canary – Momentum's mouthpiece.) Jeremy Corbyn - totally cleared of anti-Semitism: it is his attackers who are all racists.

For A Level Students Only:
This is the famous Antithesis, immortalised by Hegel/Karl Marx as – thesis – antithesis – synthesis.
Two opposites produce a result. Man-woman. Bourgeois – proletariat. Bloody Revolution: Eternal Happiness.
Hegel is one of the major philosophers of the 19th century: He lectured at Heidelberg University. Here are a couple of his own antitheses:
We learn from history that we do not learn from history.
Whatever is reasonable is true, and whatever is true is reasonable.

Merism

Add dignity to your description.

When my son was at school, he wrote essays like this: 

We went to the seaside. It was nice.

He could never understand why he didn't get good marks. He is now a very successful architect, by the way.

What should he have done? How about

 I went to the seaside where the sea was playing on the shore where waves and rivulets glimmered, and the sun in the sky was shining on grown-ups and children and dogs alike.  

See? Now it is much more interesting. Detail, repeating the same thing over and over again for the second and third time, and then perhaps once more for good measure, makes a much longer and more fascinating, gripping and, yes, emotive sentence.

Or you can be contrasting and you can also set words against each other as if they are competing for your attention.

Always = night and day. Tomorrow = at the rising of the sun and the ending of the night. Permanent = until hell freezes over and heaven falls into the sea. (Well, perhaps not!)

Lawyers go crazy over merism. It covers every possibility:

The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America, When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

Here I have reduced to its bare bones to show the merisms that lawyers – and the American Founding Fathers - so loved, enjoyed and employed during their writing and during their long and trenchant discussions over their Declaration of Independence:

The unanimous Declaration of the thirteen United States of America: When it becomes necessary to assume the separate and equal station to which God entitles them, respect requires that they should declare the causes.

Merism, if nothing else, is a good way to extend a piece of writing, whether it is a thank-you e mail or (dread) that essay which has to be handed in tomorrow.

If you want to add dignity to your work, then merism is a very good way of doing it.

A Level students only:Examiners loathe, detest and hate merism. They dismiss it as waffle, padding and a waste of paper. 
Everyone else loves it. See for yourself next time you are talking, maybe even chatting, or perhaps discussing something political or scientific with someone else – old or young, friend or foe, male or female! 

Blazon

How do you go about describing people?

You split them into different bits. What is he wearing on his head? What do his fingers look like? What are his teeth like? What are the whites of his eyes like? What is on his feet?

This used, in Biblical Times to be the best way to get the attention of someone you fancied. Send them a list of all their body parts with a neat simile/metaphor attached to each one.

Behold thou art fair, my love;

behold thou art fair; thou hast doves' eyes within thy locks;

thy hair is like a flock of goats, that appear from Mount Gilead.

Thy teeth are like a flock of sheep that are even shorn, which come up from the washing…

Easy to mock this:

toes like blue glass marbles

nails like wax shavings

feet like those of an elephant   

heels like narrow escapes

soles like yellow sponges expanding in water   

legs like longitude and latitude   

knees like neon headlights

thighs like open desert in a movie   

hips like a leaping horse

a belly button like a luminescent watch   

That is how Camille Guthrie describes her boyfriend. Having done each part (yes that too) of his Exterior, she then goes on to describe his Interior.

I think we will leave that for the moment.

So what use is this “blazon” to us today?

It really works for a villain.

His missing tooth showed in his crooked smile and his breath was rank, fresh from the thin cigarette which he carefully tapped with a brown finger over his snotty sleeve.

Or for a lady.

She handed me a creamy piece of paper. Her hands were white and I couldn't help noticing that her fingers were those of a concert pianist, long, elegant. Her wrists reminded me of the Madonna and child by Botticelli.

Or for a fight.

Facing me stood a giant. His legs were like tree trunks. Even his hands were the claws of a bear. His black eyes gleamed beneath brows that lowered like the coming storm...

A blazon, in other words, is a very good way of describing people. 

Mr Lightfoot straightened his tie with a hand that was as soft as the pudgy cheeks of a baby's bottom. He smiled beneath his walrus moustache. He stood up behind his desk and I thought of a seal rising from the cold Atlantic…