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Babygirl90Concrete and Abstract Description Exercise
(adapted from an exercise in The Longman Journal for Creative Writing, by Sibyl Johnston)
Concrete description is description that involves one or more of the five senses: sight, sound, smell, touch, or taste. Abstract description does not involve the physical senses but rather an intellectual or emotional judgment.
“The snow dissolved on his skin, soaking his mittens so the wet wool stank, and trickling from his wrists down his arms and into his flannel shirt.” This is a concrete description; it involves the senses of touch and smell. By contrast, “The snow was unpleasant” is an abstract description; it involves an intellectual or emotional judgment. And this description, from a story by student writer Elliot Freeman, is a little of both, precisely defining snow’s physical nature while drawing upon several abstractions and using metaphor to evoke the sense of smell: “Snow really does have an aroma, even though it’s just condensation; it smells like crispness, it smells like being new again, it smells like a free-floating miracle.” Elliot’s description certainly appeals to the physical senses—yet he compares the concrete thing—snow—to the abstractions of crispness, newness, and a miracle, and so this description is, finally, more abstract than concrete.
Part I: Concrete Description
Choose an object, preferably (but not required) something organic—a fruit or vegetable, shell, leaf, or rock will work well:
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Next, write a description of the object in the space below:
Is your description a concrete description, drawing upon the physical senses, or is it an abstract description, relying upon an intellectual evaluation or comparison? Write another description, trying to make it more concrete than previous description:
Part II: Metaphor
Not all descriptions will fall solidly into one category or the other; some, like Elliot’s above, are a little more difficult to categorize. Some of these more flexible descriptions involve metaphors. A metaphor has two parts: the thing described, and what it’s compared to. Both may involve the senses, or only one. Even in abstract metaphors such as Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s description of snow—“the poem of the air”—the purpose is generally to make concrete by comparison. Yet in a simple, strict sense, the act of comparison itself is an intellectual rather than a sensory process. Metaphors are abstract by virtue of that process: the reliance upon a deliberate comparison rather than on sense-memory only, as with sensory description. The kind of comparison a metaphor evokes is frequently associative and intuitive rather than straightforwardly linear or logical; metaphors are one of the most powerful ways of combining the abstract and the concrete that is available to writers. So when someone compares an eggplant to Gerard Depardieu, appealing to the senses in a symbolic rather than literal way, which category should we place the description in? Is it concrete or abstract? For now, consider it to occupy a gray area between the two. But don’t just leave it there—think about metaphors and how do they work. How can you use them in your writing?
Now try writing a description of your object using metaphor:
Part III: A description poem
Write a poem of at least a six lines about the object you chose in Part I. Try to work in parts of the descriptions you wrote, and in your poem make the object as real as you can for the reader.