Description is any type of communication that aims to make vivid a place, object, person, group, or other physical entity.[1] Description is one of four rhetorical modes (also known as modes of discourse), along with exposition, argumentation, and narration.[2]
Fiction-writing specifically has modes such as action, exposition, description, dialogue, summary, and transition.[3] Author Peter Selgin refers to methods, including action, dialogue, thoughts, summary, scenes, and description.[4] Currently, there is no consensus within the writing community regarding the number and composition of fiction-writing modes and their uses.
Description is the fiction-writing mode for transmitting a mental image of the particulars of a story. Together with dialogue, narration, exposition, and summarization, description is one of the most widely recognized of the fiction-writing modes. As stated in Writing from A to Z, edited by Kirk Polking, description is more than the amassing of details; it is bringing something to life by carefully choosing and arranging words and phrases to produce the desired effect.[5] The most appropriate and effective techniques for presenting description are a matter of ongoing discussion among writers and writing coaches.
A purple patch is an over-written passage in which the writer has strained too hard to achieve an impressive effect, by elaborate figures or other means. The phrase (Latin: "purpureus pannus") was first used by the Roman poet Horace in his Ars Poetica (c. 20 BC) to denote an irrelevant and excessively ornate passage; the sense of irrelevance is normally absent in modern usage, although such passages are usually incongruous. By extension, purple prose is lavishly figurative, rhythmic, or otherwise overwrought.[6]
In philosophy, the nature of description has been an important question since Bertrand Russell's classical texts.[7]