Length:  at least 750 words (roughly three double-spaced pages)

Due dates:  7.8.15 (proposal), 7.10.15 (rough draft), 7.13.14 (final)

Just as there’s rarely such a thing as an objective, impartial, non-rhetorical visual image, there’s rarely such a thing as an objective, impartial, non-rhetorical description. Our goal is to use this fact to our advantage—not dishonestly, but carefully and persuasively, to shape an audience’s understanding of some person, place, or thing.  In this, we aim to bring to our writing something of the power of the image to move an audience, to persuade them of something, to get them to see something differently.

Your task is to subjectively describe a fascinating “object” (person, place, or concrete thing—not event, which would be narrative rather than descriptive, and not general abstract phenomena like “college” or “snowboarding”) in such a way as to persuade a particular view of that object:  positive, negative, nostalgic, disgusted, enraptured, melancholic but still hopeful, etc.  Description is often—if not always—an act of persuasion, deliberate or otherwise. Think of description in a novel:  the purpose is rarely just to flesh out a fictional world or make it seem more realistic, but rather to shape a reader’s perspective, emotions, expectations, and so on.  Think, too, of the way particular descriptive details in a novel or story (or physical/costume/set details in a film or television show) are used to imply bigger and deeper things; you might think of your description as operating this way, too, marshaling the suggestive powers of surface particulars to imply deeper and broader things within a larger context.

In this case, you should be especially strategic in your description—you should write a description whose persuasive effects are not accidental but carefully calculated and cultivated, like the effects of various compositional choices in a photo. Decide what elements of the object in question you want to reveal and emphasize, and what elements you want to downplay because they don’t necessarily fit the dominant impression you aim to produce. Think, too, about what mode of description you want to use (think of the many different contexts in which description takes place, from the obituary to the résumé to the Facebook profile), about what the expectations and constraints of that mode are (what kinds of details does a particular mode tend to dwell on?), about what kind of narrative voice might be effective and interesting (Amram’s TV critic voice, the first-person inhabiting of Comic Sans as a narrator, Kincaid’s second-person narration, etc.), and so on. As the person describing the object, you must choose how to characterize it, and in an important way, therefore, you shape the object’s meaning and significance to your reader. Ultimately, you should aim to transform our understanding of or feelings toward your object. As an audience, we should come away from your description with a new sense of what’s been described—not just a more vivid or detailed sense, but a sense that differs significantly from how we imagined this person/place/thing before reading your essay.  As we read your piece, your subject should be transformed for us before our very eyes.