Practical English Composition

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III DESCRIPTION Description is the kind of speech or of writing that aims to give an exact impression of a thing that the speaker or the writer has either perceived or imagined. Whatever may be seen, heard, smelled, felt, or tasted, i. e., whatever may be perceived through the senses, is material for description. A description must take one of two forms according to its purpose: it must be either (1) artistic description, or (2) scientific, or enumerative, description. Artistic Description. -- Artistic description is description which aims to arouse in the listener or the reader the same feeling that the object described would arouse. Most artistic descriptions are word pictures of landscapes, of settlements, of buildings or parts of buildings, or of people. Selection and Characterization of Details. -- Read the following description, forming the picture as you read: Immediately below him the hillside fell away, clean and cleared, for fifteen hundred feet, where a little village of stone-walled houses, with roofs of beaten earth, clung to the steep tilt. All around it the tiny terraced fields lay out like aprons of patchwork on the knees of the mountain, and cows no bigger than beetles grazed between the smooth stone circles of the threshing floors. Looking across the valley, the eye was deceived by the size of things and could not at first realize that what seemed to be low scrub on the opposite mountain flank, was in truth a forest of hundred- foot pines. Purun Bhagat saw an eagle swoop across the gigantic hollow, but the great bird dwindled to a dot ere it was halfway over. A few bands of scattered clouds, strung up and down the valley, catching on a shoulder of the hills or rising up and dying out when they were level with the head of the pa...