July 29, 2005
Lesson 2

How's this?

Jerome was wearing a crisp white dress shirt open at the neck, faded blue jeans and Dingo cowboy boots. Curly brown hair worn to the shoulder peeked out from beneath his stained Stetson. He had blue eyes, a pug nose and thin lips above a square jaw.

There's nothing wrong here in particular. Nothing particularly right, either. The use of the passive voice in description isn't so much like a weed in commercial fiction these days as a cold virus--it's everywhere. At the very least we can improve this by saying "Jerome wore a crisp white dress shirt..." instead of "was wearing." But part of the problem here is that it's just a physical description. Although it might hint at something about Jerome, it really doesn't tell us much, and in many ways it's eminently forgettable. It's a bit like describing a passive snapshot. How about this?

Jerome looked like a cross between a Fortune 500 Executive and a cowboy. He wore a crisp white dress shirt open at the neck, faded blue jeans and Dingo cowboy boots. His curly brown hair peeking from beneath his stained Stetson was too long for conventional businesses, but for his business it was fine if that's what he wanted. He had squinty blue eyes, as if from hours of staring into the sun, or perhaps at a computer spreadsheet, but the sunburned pug nose, thin lips and square jaw were all Home On The Range.

I like this better, though it's longer, but we're getting a different sense of Jerome that makes his description useful, not just descriptive. It's telling us something about the man. Now, instead of a passive description dump, it would be even better if we make this description active. How about this?

Jerome looked like a cross between a Fortune 500 Executive and a cowboy. He brushed grime off his crisp white dress shirt, dusted his hands off on his faded jeans and scraped the cow dung off his Dingo cowboy boots. Peeling off his faded and grimed Stetson, he shook out the long curly hair he took so much flack about from his bosses back at the office. Squinting blue eyes more accustomed to computer spreadsheets than staring into a Texas sun, he scratched his square jaw with his manicured nails, compressed his tight lips and said, "Mr. Farrelly, the numbers aren't adding up. The bank's looking at your loan application for the ranch, but I'm afraid there's some problems with your assets. There are too many discrepancies with your..."

Well, before we get involved in rancher Farrelly's financial problems, I just want to point out that any of the descriptions used here are probably fine, depending on what you're trying to accomplish. But the biggest problem with the first set is it's easy for the reader to skip it and forget it. I actually like the second one, but the third one isn't just description, it's story. Even in nonfiction, we're telling a story, and making our descriptions active rather than passive is a good thing.

Now, before I start fussing with the third one, dropping the first sentence and wondering exactly about Jerome's cowboy background and how he ended up in the auditing department of a bank counting ranch assets, I'm going to go back to work.

Best,
Mark Terry