Make your descriptions brief and try to convey vividly the first impression.
The front of your school building, your home, an old barn, the handsomest house in your neighborhood, a country church, the kitchen of your home, your own room, a hen house with the hens just going to roost, a dovecot, any public monument you may know, the inside of a public library, the post office, a drug store, a carpenter's shop, a blacksmith's, an iron foundry, a milliner's shop, a beehive, a crow's nest, an ant-hill, a spider's web, an aquarium, a farmhouse, a tall office building, an ocean steamer, a sailboat, any curious house you may have seen.
One good exercise for forcing yourself to express quickly the aspect of a given object at a given time is to try to describe something in very rapid motion, of which you can get only a momentary glimpse. For instance:—
1. The squirrel would shoot up the tree, making only a brown streak from the bottom to the top.
2. Away across the endless dead level of the prairie a black speck appears against the sky, and it is plain that it moves. Well, I should think so! In a second or two it becomes a horse and rider, rising and falling, rising and falling, sweeping toward us nearer and nearer, growing more and more distinct, more and more sharply defined, nearer and still nearer, and the flutter of the hoofs comes faintly to the ear. Another instant, a whoop and hurrah from all of us, a wave of the rider's hand, but no reply, and man and horse burst past our excited faces, and go winging away like a belated fragment of a storm!
Exercise 109.—1. Try to give a brief, vivid impression of an express train passing at full speed, an automobile, a steamer, a race horse, a man running, a dog chasing a cat. 2. Describe how you are impressed by the passage through a short tunnel of a train you are on, by a village you pass on an express, by a bit of forest your train darts through.
66. Description of People.—Read these two passages, the second of which is a description by the historian Motley of Thackeray, the great English novelist.
1. Mr. Creakle's face was fiery, and his eyes were small and deep in his head. He had thick veins in his forehead, a little nose, and a large chin. He was bald on the top of his head, and had some thin, wet-looking hair that was just turning gray, brushed across each temple, so that the two sides interlaced on his forehead. But the circumstance about him which most impressed me was that he had no voice, but spoke in a whisper.—Charles Dickens: David Copperfield.
2. He has the appearance of a colossal infant, smooth, white, shiny, ringlety hair,—flaxen alas! with advancing years, a roundish face, with a little dab of a nose, upon which it is a perpetual wonder how he keeps his spectacles, a sweet but rather piping voice with something of a childish treble about it, and a very tall, slightly stooping figure.
In writing this sort of quick sketch, notice what impresses you first about your subject, that is, what is the most characteristic feature. In Dickens's description of the house, it was the fact that the whole building seemed to be leaning forward; in Motley's picture of Thackeray, it was the fact that the great novelist looked curiously like a little child; in Dickens's Mr. Creakle, it was the fact that the school-teacher had no voice.