tailieunhanh - the oxford essensial guide to writing phần 9

Tham khảo tài liệu 'the oxford essensial guide to writing phần 9', ngoại ngữ, ngữ pháp tiếng anh phục vụ nhu cầu học tập, nghiên cứu và làm việc hiệu quả | DESCRIPTION 357 vagrant odours greasy wind rain . like grease cobblestones . scummed with grease. You can see that details work differently in impressionistic description than in objective. Connotations are more important and diction is charged with emotion. The writer wants to arouse in readers a response like his own. But he must do more than merely tell us how he feels. He must re-create the scene in a significantly altered manner including this detail and omitting that exaggerating one image and underplaying another and calling up compelling similes and metaphors. In short the perception must be refracted through the writer s consciousness. It may emerge idealized like a landscape by a romantic painter. It may be distorted and made ugly like a reflection in a funhouse mirror. Idealization and distortion are perfectly legitimate. The writer of subjective description signs no contract to deliver literal truth. Here he or she says is how see it. Yet the description may reveal a deeper truth than mere objective accuracy and like an artist s caricature make plain a subtle reality. To convey subjective truth then a writer must embody responses in the details of the scene. Often in fact he or she relies exclusively upon such embodiment making little or no statement of feeling and instead forcing the perception to speak for itself. A simple case is catalogue description in which the writer lists detail after detail each contributing to a dominant impression. The following paragraph is a good example it describes an outdoor market on Decatur Street in New Orleans The booths are Sicilian hung with red peppers draped with garlic piled with fruit trayed with vegetables fresh and dried herbs. A huge man fat as Silenus daintily binds bunches for soup while his wife quarters cabbages ties smaller bundles of thyme parsley green onions small hot peppers and sweet pimentos to season gumbos. Another Italian with white moustache smiling fiercely from a tanned face offers jars of .