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SUGGESTED SUBJECTS FOR THEMES

1. The right way to study.

2. What it costs to go to college.

3. How to get on in the world.

4. Ants as farmers.

5. Water polo as a college sport.

6. A country newspaper.

7. It pays to be polite.

8. On writing themes.

9. Popular superstitions.

10. The recent vogue of the animal story.

11. My outside reading.

12. My favorite character in Dickens.

CHAPTER VII

DESCRIPTION

61. Definition. - Description, as we have seen, is that kind of writing which deals with things as they appeal to the senses or to the imagination. Its aim is to give the reader an idea of the appearance of things. Hence we may define it, simply, as the portrayal of things by means of language.

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Ordinarily when we speak of description we mean the portrayal of physical things, whether real or imaginary, things that appeal to the senses, such as trees, houses, landscapes, etc. The term is also applied, however, to the delineation of characters, mental states, etc., things purely immaterial or spiritual.

Thus the second of the two following passages is no less a description than the first:

On three sides of Edinburgh, the country slopes downward from the city, here to the sea, there to the fat farms of Haddington, there to the mineral fields of Linlithgow. On the south alone, it keeps rising until it not only out-tops the Castle but looks down on Arthur's Seat. The character of the neighborhood is pretty strongly marked by a scarcity of hedges; by many stone walls of varying height; by a fair amount of timber, some of it well grown, but apt to be of a bushy, northern profile and poor in foliage; by here and there a little river, Esk or Leith or Almond, busily journey

ing to the bottom of its glen; and from almost every point by a peep of the sea or the hills. There is no lack of variety, and yet most of the elements are common to all parts; and the southern district is alone distinguished by considerable summits and a wide view.1

again, and now She might have

Dorothea by this time had turned cold threw herself back helplessly in her chair. compared her experience at that moment to the vague, alarmed consciousness that her life was taking on a new form, that she was undergoing a metamorphosis in which memory would not adjust itself to the stirring of new organs. Everything was changed in its aspect: her husband's conduct, her own duteous feeling towards him, every struggle between them and yet more, her whole relation to Will Ladislaw. Her world was in a state of convulsive change; the only thing she could say distinctly to herself was, that she must wait and think anew. One change terrified her as if it had been a sin; it was a violent shock of repulsion from her departed husband, who had had hidden thoughts, perhaps perverting everything she said and did. Then again she was conscious of another change which also made her tremulous; it was a sudden yearning of heart towards Will Ladislaw. It had never before entered her mind that he could, under any circumstances, be her lover: conceive the effect of the sudden revelation that another had thought of him in that light that perhaps he himself had been conscious of such a possibility, - and this with the hurrying, crowding vision of unfitting conditions, and questions not to be solved."

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62. Relation to other forms of discourse. scription is very common in literature, though it is seldom used alone. Ordinarily, it is used as an

1 R. L. Stevenson, Edinburgh.
George Eliot, Middlemarch.

aid to other forms of writing, particularly narration, to which, indeed, it is well-nigh indispensable. In books of travel-books which aim, as a rule, to give an impression of things seen - we may sometimes find examples of almost pure description; yet even in such books there is, in most cases, a thread of story mingled with the description. Description and narration, in fact, are so closely related in aim and so helpful to each other that they are almost always used together. Description furnishes the setting for narration, without which it would be but a bare record of events; narration, in its turn, gives life and activity to description, without which it would soon become wearisome.

In some of its forms, description is also very closely related to exposition. Thus, while ordinarily it deals only with individuals, it sometimes deals, or seems to deal, like exposition, with types, as in the following:

The panther, or as he is more commonly called, the mountain lion, is no such square-built mass of muscle, no such bundle of energy as the wild-cat, though much longer and larger. The figure is wiry and serpentine, and has all the action and grace of the tiger. It is preeminently a figure for crouching, sneaking, springing, and dragging down. His struggle for life is perhaps not so desperate as that of the cats, because he lives high up in the desert mountains where game is more plentiful; but he is a very good struggler for all that. Occasionally one hears his cry in the night (a cry that stops the yelp of the coyote very quickly and sets the ears of the jack-rabbit a-trembling) but he is seldom seen unless sought for. Even then the seeker does not usually care to look for

him, or at him too long. He has the tiger eye, and his jaw and claw are too powerful to be trifled with. He will not attack one unless at bay or wounded; but as a mountain prowler he is the terror of the young deer, the mountain sheep, and the rabbit family.1

No particular, individual panther is here described, but rather the panther in general. It will be observed, however, that the writer imagines the typeform as an individual, and pictures it for us as such. His aim is not to give such an exact account of the animal's habits or relationship to other animals as will enable us to classify it, but merely to give us some idea of its appearance and characteristic actions; that is to say, his aim is mainly portrayal, not explanation, and hence his account is to be regarded as description rather than exposition.

More nearly explanatory in purpose, and there fore more nearly verging upon exposition, is the following:

The woodchuck always burrows on a side-hill. This enables him to guard against being drowned out, by making the termination of the hole higher than the entrance. He digs in slanting'y for about two or three feet, then makes a sharp upward turn and keeps nearly parallel with the surface of the ground for a distance of eight or ten feet farther, according to the grade. Here he makes his nest and passes the winter, holing up in October or November and coming out again in April. This is a long sleep, and is rendered possible only by the amount of fat with which the system has become

1 John C. Van Dyke, The Desert, p. 157.

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