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The Art of Public Speaking by Dale Carnegie and J. Berg Esenwein onlineXX INFLUENCING BY DESCRIPTIONpage 1 of 8 | table of contents  The groves of Eden vanish'd now so long, --ALEXANDER POPE, _Windsor Forest_. The moment our discourse rises above the ground-line of familiar facts, and is inflamed with passion or exalted thought, it clothes itself in images. A man conversing in earnest, if he watch his intellectual processes, will find that always a material image, more or less luminous, arises in his mind, contemporaneous with every thought, which furnishes the vestment of the thought.... This imagery is spontaneous. It is the blending of experience with the present action of the mind. It is proper creation. --RALPH WALDO EMERSON, _Nature_. Like other valuable resources in public speaking, description loses its power when carried to an extreme. Over-ornamentation makes the subject ridiculous. A dust-cloth is a very useful thing, but why embroider it? Whether description shall be restrained within its proper and important limits, or be encouraged to run riot, is the personal choice that comes before every speaker, for man's earliest literary tendency is to depict. _The Nature of Description_ To describe is to call up a picture in the mind of the hearer. "In talking of description we naturally speak of portraying, delineating, coloring, and all the devices of the picture painter. To describe is to visualize, hence we must look at description as a pictorial process, whether the writer deals with material or with spiritual objects."[19] If you were asked to describe the rapid-fire gun you might go about it in either of two ways: give a cold technical account of its mechanism, in whole and in detail, or else describe it as a terrible engine of slaughter, dwelling upon its effects rather than upon its structure. The former of these processes is exposition, the latter is true description. Exposition deals more with the _general_, while description must deal with the _particular_. Exposition elucidates _ideas_, description treats of _things_. Exposition deals with the _abstract_, description with the _concrete_. Exposition is concerned with the _internal_, description with the _external_. Exposition is _enumerative_, description _literary_. Exposition is _intellectual_, description _sensory_. Exposition is _impersonal_, description _personal_. If description is a visualizing process for the hearer, it is first of all such for the speaker--he cannot describe what he has never seen, either physically or in fancy. It is this personal quality--this question of the personal eye which sees the things later to be described--that makes description so interesting in public speech. Given a speaker of personality, and we are interested in his personal view--his view adds to the natural interest of the scene, and may even be the sole source of that interest to his auditors. The seeing eye has been praised in an earlier chapter (on "Subject and Preparation") and the imagination will be treated in a subsequent one (on "Riding the Winged Horse"), but here we must consider the _picturing mind_: the mind that forms the double habit of seeing things clearly--for we see more with the mind than we do with the physical eye--and then of re-imaging these things for the purpose of getting them before the minds' eyes of the hearers. No habit is more useful than that of visualizing clearly the object, the scene, the situation, the action, the person, about to be described. Unless that primary process is carried out clearly, the picture will be blurred for the hearer-beholder. |