Description

1. Description Sam Suzuki Karissa Patel Mia Silva Erin Thornton Michael Horcasitas

2. What is Description? • Description is used to provide sensory details for a literary piece. • It can be used to establish mood and create concrete pictures within the readers’ minds. • Uses sensory language that appeals to your senses such as touch, taste, smell, sound, and sight. • Details used in description enable the reader to picture or relive what the writer is telling, e.g., The massive brick structure sprawled across a quarter acre of ground and rose more than sixty feet into the air. • It can also be persuasive to get readers to see what you see, and feel what you feel as well as get them to empathize with your subject, you, or your argument. • Description is used as well to engage the audience and make the abstract seem more concrete. • Description is not only used for sensory purpose but to describe an abstract idea and make it bore specific. For example freedom is ambiguous but when describing the freedom given to the slaves by the Emancipation Proclamation the idea of freedom is more uniform and concrete. • Answers the questions "Who, What, Where, When, and Why or How?" • Often times is used alongside narration.

3. How to use description • Description brings a work to life mostly a literally work. • Don’t be bland on description: Ex. Her hair was dark. Say Her hair was a color of caramel fudge.. • Avoid using “That”. Avoid Adv. • Ex: She ran slowly. Retain the meaning remove the Adv. Ex: She ran at a slow pace. • Description involves senses such as touch, sight, hear, smell. Ect. • Also when writing compare it with something reader are familiar with. Ex: The wind was fast. Vs. The wind was also fast as a train. • By using description we can establish our writing style(gives you personality), you can also use it in the in intro paragraph to create (hook) • Can be used in conclusion par so you're not summarizing, but you're characterizing the piece.

4. Description Vs. Narration and Exemplification • Description vs. Narration • Description can be found on two levels, a larger level and a smaller level. • A larger level would be “The Myth of the Latin Woman” because it describes the culture and the stereotype using narration to provide examples. • On a smaller level one can find description in narration. For this reason it should not be confused for description when it is used on a larger scale. • Description vs. Exemplification • The author uses narration as examples to describe the situation as a whole.

5. Why we chose this Article • We chose this article because we saw that it portrayed not only description, but narration as well. • Description and narration are often mistaken for each other, or appear in company with each other. • Description helped Judith Ortiz Cofer with proving her argument against prejudice. • The article is relatable to all races, who experience the affects of stereotyping in present time.

6. Examples of Description • “The big and the little screens have presented us with the picture of the funny Hispanic maid, mispronouncing words and cooking up a spicy storm in a shiny California kitchen,”(374) • “ In retrospect I understand that my anger gave my reading fire, that I have almost always taken doubts in my abilities as a challenge—and that the result is, most times, a feeling of satisfaction at having won a covert when I see the cold, ap- praising eyes warm to my words, the body language change, the smile that indicates that I have opened some avenue for communication,”(374) • “I still experience a vague sense of letdown when I'm invited to a "party" and it turns out to be a marathon conversation in hushed tones rather than a fiesta with salsa, laughter, and dancing—the kind of celebration I remember from my childhood,”(371) • “On a bus trip to London from Oxford University where I was earning some graduate credits one summer, a young man, obviously fresh from a pub, spotted me and as if struck by inspiration went down on his knees in the aisle,” (370)

7. Précis • The writer, Judith Ortiz Cofer’s, “The Myth of Latin Woman” (1993) Cofer elucidates that Latin woman struggle against the many stereotypes that originate from their portrayal in American media. • To do this, Cofer uses the rhetorical mode of description, to recount numerous incidents where she has personally encountered prejudice. • Cofer’s purpose is to debunk the “myths” about the Latin woman, to not only transform them individually, but also to “achieve a universal truth” so that her audience can see past “[her] skin color, [her] accent, or [her] clothes.” • Her audience is those who are not yet enlightened about the untruthfulness of the stereotypes set forth against Latin women.