Description


Description is any type of communication that aims to make vivid a place, object, person, group, or other physical entity. It is one of four rhetorical modes, along with exposition, argumentation, and narration.

Fiction writing

Fiction writing specifically has modes such as action, exposition, description, dialogue, summary, and transition. Author Peter Selgin refers to methods, including action, dialogue, thoughts, summary, scenes, and description.
Description is the mode for transmitting a mental image of the particulars of a story. Together with dialogue, narration, exposition, and summarization, it is one of the most widely recognized of the fiction-writing modes. As stated in Writing from A to Z, edited by Kirk Polking, it is more than the amassing of details; it is bringing something to life by carefully choosing and arranging words and phrases to produce the desired effect.

Purple prose

A purple patch is an over-written passage in which the writer has strained too hard to achieve an impressive effect, by elaborate figures or other means. The phrase was first used by the Roman poet Horace in his Ars Poetica to denote an irrelevant and excessively ornate passage; the sense of irrelevance is normally absent in modern usage, although such passages are usually incongruous. By extension, purple prose is lavishly figurative, rhythmic, or otherwise overwrought.

Philosophy

In philosophy, the nature of description has been an important question since Bertrand Russell's classical texts.