Words and their classes may be either general or specific, depending on their contexts. If we compare book to nonfiction, nonfiction is specific, but if we compare nonfiction to biography, nonfiction is general. Thus, a word may be general in one context but specific in another context.
One of the most important tasks a writer or speaker has is to capture details. There are two ways to describe anything: with generalizations and with specifics. It is impossible to write or speak about anything without making some general observations. However, you will want to include both types of description. The specifics may be sensory details and/or explicit objective details such as size, shape and color. Specific details make one's writing more powerful, grounding the work in particular physical and emotional contexts. Specific details can come from a writer's or speaker's experiences, memories or imagination. With respect to experience, memory and imagination, writers and speakers use everyday details of sight, sound, smell, taste and touch, not simply to record the events, places and times in their discourses, but also to make the events, places and times real for their audiences.
Notice the use of objective and sensory details in the following passage by Maya Angelou:
The amount and variety of foods would have found approval
on the menu of a Roman epicure. Pans of fried chicken,
covered with dishtowels, sat under benches next to a
mountain of potato salad crammed with hard-boiled eggs.
Whole rust-red sticks of bologna were clothed in cheese-
cloth. Homemade pickles and chow-chow, and baked country
hams, aromatic with cloves and pineapples, vied for
prominence. Our steady customers had ordered cold
watermelons, so Bailey and I chugged the striped-green fruit
into the Coca-Cola box and filled all the tubs with ice as well
as the big black wash pot that Momma used to boil her
laundry. Now they too lay sweating in the happy afternoon
air. The summer picnic gave ladies a chance to show off their
baking hands. On the barbecue pit, chickens and spareribs
sputtered in their own fat and a sauce whose recipe was
guarded in the family like a scandalous affair. However, in
the ecumenical light of the summer picnic every true baking
artist could reveal her prize to the delight and criticism of the
town. Orange sponge cakes and dark brown mounds dripping
Hershey's chocolate stood layer to layer with ice-white
coconuts and light brown caramels. Pound cakes sagged with
their buttery weight and small children could no more resist
licking the icings than their mothers could avoid slapping the
sticky fingers.*
Maya Angelou easily could have written that the picnic was full of meat, accompaniments, fruit and sweets. But to make the picnic more real, she includes such details as "a mountain of potato salad" (size), "Whole rust-red sticks of bologna" (shape), "Orange sponge cakes and dark mounds dripping Hershey's chocolate" (color), "the big black wash pot that Momma used to boil her laundry" (sight), "On the barbecue pit, chickens and spareribs sputtered in their own fat" (sound), "baked country hams, aromatic with cloves and pineapples" (smell), "Pound cakes sagged with their buttery weight" (taste), and "cold watermelons" (touch).
In academic and professional discourse, details are known as backing. Backing is grounds in detail, grounds being reasons and/or evidence. A thesis is a claim with grounds. An example: I need to work this summer so that I can buy a new car. The claim is "I need to work this summer," and the grounds is "so that I can buy a new car." Let us suppose my parents disagree with me. To convince them that I indeed need a new car, I must provide backing. I tell them my car has over 150,000 miles, has been repaired 6 times in the past year, and has no air conditioner. Such details not only make my argument more complete, but they help make my car more real. You now know I own a rattletrap.
To create details, writers and speakers ask questions. The journalistic questions--who, what, when, where, why and how--help writers and speakers generate information. Such information, however, tends to be general. To generate specific information, ask questions about the answers: what kinds of meat, accompaniments, fruit and sweets; what kind of rattletrap?
Exercises
Make the following categories more specific so that I will know exactly what to purchase when I go to the grocer: meat, dairy product, produce.
When a person is angry, sad or happy, you know he/she is such because his/her body language, facial expressions, diction, tone, et cetera reveal his/her mood. He/she does not wear a sign that says "I'm angry," "I'm sad," or "I'm happy." Successful writers do not use such labels because they are abstract in that everyone has a different conception of those emotions. Everyone reacts differently to anger, sadness and happiness. When you describe someone's mood, you must reveal his/her body language, facial expressions, diction, tone, et cetera so that the reader can envision the person as a unique individual. Describe a boyfriend's or girlfriend's reaction when you told him/her that you no longer wanted to be his/her companion.
_______________________________________________________
*Maya Angelou
, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (New York: Bantam, 1993) 115-16.
