2.Description:

purpose: to paint a picture in words

- static

Description - evaluative

- figurative language

- relies on sensory details

(M. Twain)

Directly it began to rain, and it rained like all fury. … And then a perfect ripper of a gust would follow along and set the branches to tossing their arms as if they was just wild; the next, when it was just about the bluest and blackest - fst! It was as bright as glory … and you’d hear the thunder go with an awful crash and then go rumbling, grumbling, tumbling down the sky towards the underside of the world, like rolling empty barrels downstairs.

Types:

a) portrait

b) landscape / place of action

a. portrait

A.Huxley Crome Yellow

In the midst of this brown gloom Mr Bodiham sat at his desk. He was the man in the Iron mask. A great metallic face with iron cheekbones and narrow iron brow; iron folds, hard and unchanging, ran perpendicularly down his cheeks, his nose was the iron beak of some thin, delicate bird . He had brown eyes, set in sockets rimmed with iron. Dense wiry hair covered his scull. His jaws, his chin, his upper lip were dark, iron-dark, where he shaved. His voice was harsh, like the grating of iron hinges when a seldom-used door is opened.

b. landscape

Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping, and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city. Fog on the Essex Marshes, fog on the Kentish heights. Fog creeping into the cabooses of collier-brigs; fog lying out on the yards, and hovering in the rigging of great ships; fog drooping on the gunwales of barges and small boats. Fog in the eyes and throats of ancient Greenwich pensioners, wheezing by the firesides of their wards; fog in the stem and bowl of the afternoon pipe of' the wrathful skipper, down in his close cabin; fog cruelly pinching the toes and fingers of his shivering little 'prentice boy on deck. Chance people on the bridges peeping over the parapets into a nether sky of fog, with fog all round them, as if they were up in a balloon, and hanging in the misty clouds. (Ch. Dickens)

functions of description:

• to serve as the background for the events described

• to convey mood, sensations

• to serve as a means of rendering the personage’s image

3. Argumentation/persuasion

- purpose - to persuade by appealing to reason and emotions

•Argumentation – logical arguments to defend an issue

• Persuasion – effective means to change someone’s opinions (to convince)

Mouthpiece of the author’s point of view

J. Steinbeck America and Americans

I have often wondered at the savagery and thoughtlessness with which our early settlers approached this rich continent. They came at it as though it were an enemy. They burned the forests and changed the rainfall; they swept the buffalo from the plains, blasted the streams, set fire to the grass, and ran a reckless scythe through the virgin and noble timber.[ …] To a large extent the early people pillaged the country as though they hated it, as though they held it temporarily and might be driven off at any time.