Rhetorical Strategy of Description

A description is a detailed record of the sensory perceptions of some person, place, or thing.

In many cases, an author will seek to make a point through their descriptions.

Consider if a writer wrote about the way a rose smells, or the way hot pavement feels on bare feet, or the sound of your mother’s voice. All of those would be forms of description. The reason all of those would be forms of description is because if a writer wrote about these things, then they would be providing a detailed record of the sensory perceptions of some person, place, or thing.

If a writer wrote about the way a rose smells, the writer would be talking about the sensory perception of smell to a person. If they wrote about the way hot pavement feels on bare feet, they’d be talking about the sensory perception of touch to whoever has the bare feet. They might be talking about the sound of your mother’s voice. They’re talking about the sensory perception of hearing. They’re talking about them in terms of whoever is hearing their mother’s voice.

Sometimes an author will use short descriptions to give the reader a sense of the emotional content of the topic. It’s important as you’re reading to evaluate the descriptive details the writer is using. There are a couple of things you should look for when evaluating these details.

1. You should make sure that the details advance the author’s point. If the details aren’t advancing the author’s point, then they’re irrelevant, cumbersome to the reader, and they’re distracting from the main point that the author is trying to make.

2. The descriptive detail should also make the text more enjoyable. If the descriptive details don’t make the text more enjoyable, that means the facts are probably irrelevant or there are just too many of them; they’re becoming cumbersome to the reader and distracting from the author’s main point.

You as the reader should be constantly evaluating, whether the descriptive details included by the author advance the author’s point and make the text more enjoyable, or if they are just distracting and irrelevant.