(What questions should you ask yourself about each description you write?)
6. Trees and plants.
How shall kinnikinnick be told to them who know it not? To a New Englander it might be said that a whortleberry bush changed its mind one day and decided to be a vine, with leaves as glossy as laurel, bells pink-striped and sweet like the arbutus, and berries in clusters and of scarlet instead of black. The Indians call it kinnikinnick, and smoke it in their pipes. White men call it bearberry, I believe; and there is a Latin name for it, no doubt, in the books. But kinnikinnick is the best,—dainty, sturdy, indefatigable kinnikinnick, green and glossy all the year round, lovely at Christmas and lovely among flowers at midsummer, as content and thrifty on bare, rocky hillsides as in grassy nooks, growing in long, trailing wreaths, five feet long, or in tangled mats, five feet across, as the rock or the valley may need, and living bravely many weeks without water, to make a house beautiful. I doubt if there be in the world a vine I should hold so precious, indoors and out.
—Helen Hunt Jackson: Bits of Travel at Home.
A mango tree is beautiful and attractive. It grows as large as the oak, and has a rich and glossy foliage. The fruit is shaped something like a short, thick cucumber, and is as large as a large pear. It has a thick, tough skin, and a delicious, juicy pulp. When ripe it is a golden color. A tree often bears a hundred bushels of mangoes.
—Marian M. George.
+Theme LXVII.+—Write a description of some tree that you have seen.
(Consider your theme with reference to the general principles of composition treated in Chapter V.)
+134. Description of Persons: Character Sketches.+—The general principles of description are applicable to the description of a person, and should be followed for the purpose of presenting a clear and vivid image. Our interest, however, so naturally runs beyond the appearance and is concerned with the character, that most descriptions of persons become character sketches. Even the commonest terms of description, such as keen gray eyes, square chin, rugged countenance, are interpreted as showing character, and depart to some degree from pure description. Often the sole purpose of description is to show character, and only those details are introduced which accomplish this purpose.
In life we judge a man's character by his actions, and so in the character sketch we are led to infer his character from what he does. The character indicated by his appearance is corroborated by a statement of his actions and especially by showing how he acts. (See Section 10.) Sometimes no descriptive matter is given, but we are left to make our own picture to fit the character indicated by the actions. In many books the descriptive elements which would enable us to form an image of some person are distributed over several pages, each being introduced where it supplements and emphasizes the character shown by the actions.