EXERCISE
1. Walk rapidly past a building. Form a mental picture of it. Write down as many of the details as you can. Now look at the building again and determine what you have left out.
2. Call to mind some building with which you are familiar. Write a list of the details that you recall. Now visit the building and see what important ones you have omitted.
3. While looking at some scene make a note of the important details. Lay this list away for a day. Then recall the scene. After picturing the scene as vividly as you can, read your notes. Do they add anything to your picture?
4. Make a list of the things on some desk that you cannot see but with which you are familiar; for example, the teacher's desk. At the first opportunity notice how accurate your list is.
5. Look for some time at the stained glass windows of a church or at the wall paper of the room. What patterns do you notice that you did not see at first? What colors?
6. Make a list of the objects visible from your bedroom window. When you go home notice what you have omitted.
7. Practice observation contests similar to the following: Let two or more persons pass a store window. Each shall then make a list of what the window contains. Compare lists with one another.
+Theme LIV.+—Write a description of some dwelling.
(Select a house that you can see on the way home. Choose a point of view and notice carefully what can be seen from it. When you are ready to write, form as vivid a mental picture of the house as you can. Write the sentence that gives the fundamental image. Add such of the details as will enable the reader to form an accurate image.)
+127. Selection of Essential Details.+—After deciding upon a point of view and such general characteristics as are essential to the forming of a correct outline of the object to be described, we must next give our attention to the selection of the details. If our description has been properly begun, this general outline will not be changed, but each succeeding phrase or sentence will add to the clearness and distinctness of the picture. Our first impression of a house may include windows, but the mention of them later will bring them out clearly on our mental picture much as the details appear when one is developing a negative in photography.
If the peculiarities of an object are such as to effect its general form, they need to be stated in the opening sentence; but when the peculiar or distinguishing characteristic does not affect the form, it may be introduced later. If we say, "On the corner across the street from the post office there is a large, two-story, red brick store," the reader can form at once a general picture of such a store. Only those things which give a general outline have been included. As yet nothing has been mentioned to distinguish the store from any other similar one. If some following sentence should be, "Though not wider, it yet presents a more imposing appearance than its neighbors, because the door is placed at one side, thus making room for a single wide display window instead of two stuffy, narrow ones," a detail has been added which, though not changing the general outline, makes the picture clearer and at the same time emphasizes the distinguishing feature of this particular store.