Techniques for Writing about Observations

The short passages that follow all use specific techniques for observing people, places, objects, or events. Some emphasize objective detail; some recreate subjective reactions or feelings. In all the passages, how­ever, the writer narrows or limits the scope of the observation and selects specific details that add up to some dominant idea. The dominant idea reflects the writer’s purpose for that particular audience. As you read the excerpts, notice how the authors use the following six techniques for writing a vivid observation:

• Giving sensory details (sight, sound, smell, touch, taste). Also include actual dialogue and names of things where appropriate. Good writers often zoom in on crucial details.

• Using comparisons and images. To help readers visualize the unfamiliar (or see the commonplace in a new light), writers often draw comparisons and use evocative images.

• Describing what is not there. Sometimes keen observation requires stepping back and noticing what is absent, what is not happening, or who is not present.

• Noting changes in the subject’s form or condition. Even when the subject appears static—a landscape, a flower, a building— good writers look for evidence of changes, past or future: a tree being enveloped by tent worms, a six-inch purple-and-white iris that eight hours earlier was just a green bud, a sandstone exterior of a church being eroded by acid rain.

• Writing from a distinct point of view. Good writers assume a distinct role; in turn, their perspective helps clarify what they observe. A lover and a botanist, for example, see entirely different things in the same red rose. What is seen depends on who is doing the seeing.

• Focusing on a dominant idea. Good writers focus on those details and images that clarify the main idea or discovery. The discovery often depends on the contrast between the writer’s expectations and the reality.

These six techniques are illustrated in the following two paragraphs by Karen Blixen, who wrote Out of Africa under the pen name Isak Dinesen. A Danish woman who moved to Kenya to start a coffee plantation, Blixen knew little about the animals in Kenya Reserve. In this excerpt from her journals, she describes a startling change that occurred when she shot a large lizard, an iguana.

In the Reserve I have sometimes come upon the Iguana, the big lizards, as they were sunning themselves upon a flat stone in a riverbed. They are not pretty in shape, but nothing can be imagined more beautiful than their coloring. They shine like a heap of precious stones or like a pane cut out of an old church window. When, as you approach, they swish away, there is a flash of azure, green and purple over the stones, the color seems to be standing behind them in the air, like a comet’s luminous tail.

Once I shot an Iguana. I thought that I should be able to make some pretty things from his skin. A strange thing happened then, that I have never afterwards forgotten. As I went up to him, where he was lying dead upon his stone, and actually while I was walking the few steps, he faded and grew pale, all color died out of him as in one long sigh, and by the time that I touched him he was gray and dull like a lump of concrete. It was the live impetuous blood pulsating within the animal, which had radiated out all that glow and splendor. Now that the flame was put out, and the soul had flown, the Iguana was as dead as a sandbag.