Thick versus Thin Description

A further thought on the exercise I gave you all today that will constitute your first official blog post on Friday:

The relationship that thin description (recording the evidence of your senses with as little interpretation as possible) has to thick description (observation that provides context and interprets/discovers/creates meaning) is a little like the relationship between a photo and its caption. The photo presents you with a view of something, but you may not be able to fully understand what you're seeing without the context a caption can provide.

Of course, a photo can, and from an artistic perspective should, be interesting enough to attract and fascinate and perhaps inform even without a caption. So from this perspective, even thick descriptions should rely heavily on the tools of thin description (vivid and concrete nouns, energetic action verbs, sensory images, and the rough, smooth, or striated texture of its language), which are then "thickened" just enough to invite the reader more deeply into the place described.

This comparison also reminds us that strictly speaking, it's impossible for any description to be "ultrathin," just as a photo is never simply a recording of reality but a selection and interpretation of it.

Starting Out

"This is what you shall do: Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul; and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body...."

—Walt Whitman, from his preface to the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass