University of Chicago Writing Program
WRITING DESCRIPTION

Writing Description is a practicum course in (as the name suggests) writing description. Taught by Kathy Cochran and Tracy Weiner, the course will be offered through the University of Chicago Writing Program in Spring 2003.

It is part of a cluster of advanced Writing Program courses that includes Larry McEnerney's Writing Styles, Tracy Weiner's Writing Science and Technology, and Hank Sartin's Writing Arts Reviews. Although these courses certainly can be taken individually or out of sequence -- the only prerequisite is the completion of a Humanities Common Core sequence -- students with a practical interest in writing are encouraged to take them as a group. Unlike courses in literary criticism or in the history of literature, these courses allow students to study other people's writing primarily so that they can improve their own writing:   students will identify successful descriptive writing techniques in the class readings and then practice these techniques in frequent assignments.

Course description
Sample course materials

Course description and goals

Writing Description (ENGL 11701 / HUMA 27300 / MAPH 31100)

What does it mean to describe something? Why is good description deceptively easy to read but truly difficult to write? How do good writers of description do what they set out to do? A descriptive passage might seem to be objective or to represent subjective experience. It might seem to be covertly or overtly supporting a claim, or it might appear to add detail and richness to a narrative. Throughout this writing-intensive course, we will not take the term "description" for granted, but rather we will interrogate what we mean when we say that a piece of prose "describes" something. Students will write weekly exercises to practice styles and techniques used by superlative writers of description such as John McPhee, Virginia Woolf, J.R.R. Tolkien, Tom Wolfe, Oliver Sachs, Ernest Hemingway, H.D. Thoreau, John Ruskin, and some texts of the students' choice. Each week, we will use one class session to identify some techniques that writers use to describe, and to analyze how these techniques affect readers. During the other session, we will workshop students' exercises. The final paper will require students to analyze a description and to describe something themselves, using techniques we identify in class.  

Sample course materials

To give you some idea of the power of description, we present the following short sample of a good descriptive writer at her finest:

On the way to Dijon we had lunch in the courtyard of the old post hotel in Avallon. We were motoring down with two large soft Chicago women who were heading for Italy, mainly, it seemed, because they "simply couldn't sit five minutes in a restaurant in Rome" without being subtly assaulted by lovesick Army officers. "Italians appreciate mature women," they said, their chaste bosoms heaving with a kind of innocent yearning lechery I have often noticed in American females of their class.

I remember that once on the road, when the chauffeur got out to look at a wheel, his coat flapped open as he bent over. Both of our companions squeaked at what they saw, and hustled out of the car. They asked a question in dreadful Italian, and whipped back the lapels of their own traveling suits. And then the fat shifty-looking driver and the two elegant middle-aged women stood in the dust, their eyes fixed on one another's magic enameled Fascist Party pins, so carefully hidden until now, and the three of them solemnly saluted, chins out, just like Mussolini in the newsreels.

Al and I were oddly embarrassed, and did not look at each other.

-- from M.F.K. Fisher, The Gastronomical Me

How did she do that? Take the course to find out!

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This page has last been revised in March 2003