Definition:
In composition, a particular item of information (including descriptive, illustrative, and statistical information) that supports an idea or contributes to an overall impression in an essay, report, or other kind of text or presentation.
Details that are carefully chosen and well organized can help make a piece of writing or an oral report more precise, vivid, convincing, and interesting.
See also:
- Analysis
- Descriptive Details in Stegner's "Town Dump"
- How to Write a Descriptive Paragraph
- Parenthetical Details in Capote's Place Description
- Practice in Revising a Place Description
- Practice in Supporting a Topic Sentence with Specific Details
- Process Analysis
- Spatial Order
- Specificity
- Status Details in Tom Wolfe's Descriptions
- Writer's Notebook
Etymology:
From the Old French, "a cut-off piece"Examples and Observations:
- "Details are never simply embellishments. They serve the narrative in terms of dramatization, characterization, structure, and style. . . .
"Over and over again we're told that good, active writing is concrete rather than abstract. It's specific rather than general. And it's in these notions of active writing that details make all the difference. A detail must be both significant and specific."
(Joanne Meschery, "Details! Details! Details!" Writers Workshop in a Book, ed. by Alan Cheuse and Lisa Alvarez. Chronicle Books, 2007) - "Sometimes it takes only one or two details to light up a character for your readers. . . . The old man's carefully parted hair suggests that he has not totally given up. The tinny clatter of cheap crockery implies that the restaurateur has fallen on hard times. The sullen teenager's one-shouldered shrug connotes indifference tinged with contempt."
(Monica Wood, Description. Writer's Digest Books, 1995) - "Details are what persuade us that someone is telling the truth--a fact that every liar knows instinctively and too well. Bad liars pile on facts and figures, the corroborating evidence, the improbable digressions ending in blind alleys, while good or (at least better) liars know that it’s the single priceless detail that jumps out of the story and tells us to take it easy, we can quit our dreary adult jobs of playing judge and jury and again become as trusting children, hearing the gospel of grown-up knowledge without a single care or doubt. . . .
"'We think in generalities,' wrote Alfred North Whitehead. 'But we live in detail.' To which I would add: We remember in detail, we recognize in detail, we identify, we re-create . . .."
(Francine Prose, Reading Like a Writer. Harper, 2006) - "The charm, one might say the genius, of memory is that it is choosy, chancy and temperamental;
it rejects the edifying cathedral and indelibly photographs the small boy outside, chewing a hunk of melon in the dust."
(Elizabeth Bowen) - "Bad writers never examine anything. Their inattentiveness to the detail of their prose is part and parcel of their inattentiveness to the detail of the outside world."
(Clive James, "Georg Christoph Lichtenberg: Lessons on How to Write." Cultural Amnesia, 2007) - Tom Wolfe on the Power of Symbolic Details
"[T]he recording of everyday gestures, habits, manners, customs, styles of furniture, clothing, decoration, styles of traveling, eating, keeping house, modes of behaving toward children, servants, superiors, inferiors, peers, plus the various looks, glances, poses, styles of walking and other symbolic details that might exist within a scene. Symbolic of what? Symbolic, generally, of people's status life, using that term in the broad sense of the entire pattern of behavior and possessions through which people express their position in the world or what they think it is or what they hope it to be. . . .
"Here is the sort of thing Balzac does over and over. Before introducing you to Monsieur and Madame Marneffe personally (in Cousin Bette) he brings you into their drawing room and conducts a social autopsy: 'The furniture covered in faded cotton velvet, the plaster statuettes masquerading as Florentine bronzes, the clumsily carved painted chandelier with its candle rings of molded glass, the carpet, a bargain whose low price was explained too late by the quantity of cotton in it, which was now visible to the naked eye--everything in the room, to the very curtains (which would have taught you that the handsome appearance of wool damask lasts for only three years)'--everything in the room begins to absorb one into the lives of a pair of down-at-the-heel social climbers, Monsieur and Madame Marneffe. Balzac piles up these details so relentlessly and at the same time so meticulously . . . that he triggers the reader’s memories of his own status life, his own ambitions, insecurities, delights, disasters, plus the thousands and one small humiliations and the status coups of everyday life . . .."
(Tom Wolfe, "The New Journalism." The New Journalism, ed. by Tom Wolfe and E.W. Johnson. Harper & Row, 1973)
