Amplification (Development)

 

Almost all writing can be regarded as amplification, which is the addition to or expansion of a point or an idea for clarification or proof. Writers are constantly involved in the painstaking, deliberate process of trying to anticipate when to leave a point or an idea undeveloped and when and how to develop it more fully.

Amplification strengthens writing three ways:

• It   offers   evidence   to   support   assertions   and   arguments.

• It helps clarify any point that might not be immediately understood.

• It helps shape a thought, providing additional information that allows readers to adjust to an idea that might be unfamiliar or controversial.

 

 

Amplifying to Provide Support

 

Ideas, claims, statements, and assertions that are important require close examination and should not be made without some support. Probably 95 percent of the time, a point or an idea needs to be amplified. Although some readers grasp ideas quickly and easily, the writer cannot stay on a general, abstract level for very long. Otherwise, readers will be left with only a vague impression of what is meant. Even relatively simple ideas may be abstract or vague in readers' minds. Take a look at the following, very general, statement:

 

The teeth of the rhinoceros are unlike the teeth of any other animal.

 

Unless this sentence is amplified, readers will be asking questions like these: What is so different about their teeth? Is it their size? Shape? Number? Location? Color? Durability? Use? Why is it important to know this? Amplification gives the details that translate the abstract and the general into the concrete and more accessible world of the senses.

 

Notice in the following passage by Carol Bly, an essayist and fiction writer living in the small town of Madison, Minnesota, how the second paragraph amplifies and extends the idea of the first paragraph. The descriptive details of the second paragraph call up specific images that define more sharply what would have remained only a general impression had Bly continued to stay on the relatively abstract level of the first paragraph:

 

It is sometimes mistakenly thought by city people that grown-ups don't love snow. They think only children who haven't got to shovel it love snow, or only people like the von Furstenburgs and their friends who get to go skiing in exotic places and will never backslope a roadside in their lives: that is a mistake. The fact is that most country or small-town Minnesotans love snow. They relish snow in large inconvenient storms; they like the excesses of it, they like the threat of it, the endless work of it, the glamour of it.

Before a storm, Madison is full of people excitedly laying in food stocks for the three-day blow. People lay in rather celebratory food, too. Organic-food parents get chocolate for the children; weight watchers lay in macaroni and Sara Lee cakes; recently-converted vegetarians backslide to T-bones. People hang around the large Super-Valu window and keep a tough squinty-eyed watch on the storm progress with a lot of gruff, sensible observations (just like Houston Control talking to the moon, very much on top of it all) like "Ja, we need this for spring moisture . . ."or "Ja, it doesn't look like letting up at all . . ." or "Ja, you can see where it's beginning to drift up behind the VFW." The plain pleasure of it is scarcely hidden.

—"Great Snows," in Letters from the Country

(New York: HarperCollins, 1981), pp. 40-41.

 

Even texts that seem to consist of only narrative or descriptive details turn out, on closer examination, to be passages that move back and forth between general and specific statements. Here is a very brief passage in which each statement amplifies the statements that precede it:

 

I locked the door, kept the world out; I vegetated, hibernated, remained in stasis, idled. No telephones, no television, no radio. Alone with the presence in the room. Who? Me, my psyche, the Shadow-Beast.

—Gloria Anzaldua, Borderlands/La Frontera;

The New Mestizo (San Francisco: Spinsters/Aunt Lute, 1987), p.44.

 

Almost any idea or assertion that a writer wishes to convey represents an invitation for amplification so that both the writer and the reader can think it through, examine it more closely, and come to know more fully what it is or means. Follow the development of the passage below, in which Louis L'Amour, widely known as a best-selling author of historical fiction of the American West, begins his reflections on the

role of reading in learning.

 

This is not the story of how I came to be in Singapore. That will be told elsewhere. This is a story of an adventure in education, pursued not under the best of conditions. The idea of education has been so tied to schools, universities, and professors that many assume there is no other way, but education is available to anyone within reach of a library, a post office, or even a newsstand.

Today you can buy the Dialogues of Plato for less than you would spend on a fifth of whiskey, or Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire for the price of a cheap shirt. You can buy a fair beginning of an education in any bookstore with a good stock of paperback books for less than you would spend on a week's supply of gasoline.

Often I hear people say they do not have time to read. That's absolute nonsense. In one year during which I kept that kind of record, I read twenty-five books while waiting for people. In offices, applying for jobs, waiting to see a dentist, waiting in a restaurant for friends, many such places. I read on buses, trains, and planes. If one really wants to learn, one has to decide what is important. Spending an evening on the town? Attending a ball game? Or learning something that can be with you your life long?

Byron's Don Juan I rode on an Arab dhow sailing north from Aden up the Red Sea to Port Tewfik on the Suez Canal. Boswell's Life of Johnson I read while broke and on the beach in San Pedro. In Singapore, I came upon a copy of The Annals and Antiquities of Rajahstan by James Tod. It was in the library of a sort of YMCA for seamen, the name of which I've forgotten but which any British sailor of the time would remember, for the British had established them in many ports, for sailors ashore.

—Education of a Wandering Man (New York:

Bantam, 1989), pp. 1-2.

 

The passage consists mostly of examples, details, facts and figures, qualifications, illustrations, and even questions that start bringing an idea to life and lead to a deeper and more extensive understanding of L'Amour's concept of education. Well before the end of the passage the reader knows that an education is available to anyone who chooses to read, that books are easily accessible, and that time is available for reading. The amplification also captures some of the notion that books bring excitement even when the reader is tired, lonely, and nearly broke.

As the Keats, Bly, Anzaldua, and L'Amour passages illustrate, amplification gets us deeper into a subject, primarily by providing details for clarifying and exploring ideas, for translating experience into richly specific feelings and images, for validating—even celebrating—the experience and knowledge embodied in ideas, and for arguing the truth and claims of a proposition. Amplification can be almost anything and everything—facts, statistics, examples, anecdotes, comparisons, and restatements of those facts, statistics, examples, anecdotes, and comparisons. A text becomes meaningful primarily in terms of the details and repetition used to make it interesting and believable.

 

An underdeveloped passage that lacks the kind of amplification illustrated in the passages cited above reads like this:

 

Hardly a week goes by without some new example of attempts to enforce conformity on campus. At the California State University at Northridge, an offer by the Carl's Jr. fast-food chain to install a branch in the newly expanded bookstore was rejected last May. To Stephen Balch, Northridge's decision was outrageously intolerant.

 

How long would you keep reading something like this? Not long, we bet. The passage is boring and difficult to read. It is difficult to read because it is difficult to understand. It is difficult to understand because there is so little amplification. The lack of amplification makes the passage seem superficial, general, and disconnected. Readers yearn for the detail that will make things clear and connected. They do not know what the fast-food chain’s offer was rejected, why Balch believed the university’s decision was objectionable, or even who Balch is. Too much information is missing for this passage to be interesting, clear, meaningful, or convincing.

 

Description

 

Whenever writers need to provide more than the most general or abstract statement, they usually add sensory details that enable readers to experience or imagine what they have experienced or imagined. For example, a Time magazine correspondent uses specific visual images to portray the grimness of an abandoned apartment building where a homeless Muscovite has found shelter:

 

Yuri Pronin sleeps on a rough plank door liberated from a neighboring apartment and balanced atop heavy rusting water pipes in the tiny Moscow abode that he has called home since last December. The room has no electricity and no running water. A dented tin bread box and several empty jars serve as his kitchen, while a cardboard box doubles as chair and closet. The decor is Dickensian: bare paint-chipped walls, splintering floorboards, and windows caked with dirt. Apartments in the old Soviet Union were none too luxurious, but this is a big step down.

—Ann M. Simmons, "Brother, Can You Spare a

Ruble?" Time (July 13, 1992): 58.

 

The visual details of the first four sentences let readers see at once the grimness of Pronin's shelter. The statement "The decor is Dickensian" and the last sentence are comments on the overall impression of the scene.

                Descriptive writing requires keen observation and the ability to select details that reveal not only how something, someplace, or somebody looks, but also how things sound, smell, taste, and feel. The following description of the old part of the Moroccan city of Fez appeals equally to our senses of sight, sound, and smell to convey the essential characteristic of a part of the city that has changed very little since the fourteenth century:

 

We came out on a plaza at the center of the medina, the old city. It was crowded with people—little girls carrying wooden trays of oven-bound bread dough on their heads, veiled women doing their family wash at an exquisitely tiled public fountain, a bearded old man selling caged birds, old Berber ladies with tattooed chins squatting on curbs with their hands held out in supplication, ragged porters lashing slow-moving donkeys loaded down with ice and sheepskin and Pepsi-Cola cases.

"No cars here, not even motorcycles," Abdellatif said. "The donkey is the taxi of the medina."

The night air was clangorous with the rhythmic hammerings of the ironworkers at work on their kettles, coppersmiths beating a syncopated tap-da-tap-tap-da-tap on their ornate trays, the rasping voices of the street vendors, the tinselly laughter of schoolgirls in their crisp pastel smocks, and, above all, the raucous crying of the roosters, which seem to crow all night from the rooftops as if announcing some perpetual dawn of the spirit.

Adding to the sensory assault were the thousand tingling aromas of spices and newly cut cedarwood, of singed oxhorn (used for combs) and sizzling hot cooking oil, of freshly baked bread and ugly-smelling animal hides—all simmering together, as it were, in the warm night air.

—Harvey Arden, "Morocco's Ancient City of

Fez," National Geographic 169 (March 1986): 341.

Such details are at the heart of good descriptive writing. They convey unfamiliar scenes and experiences by capturing sight, sound, and smell (and touch and taste), and readers gain a strong sense of reality that is no longer outside their range of knowledge.

 

 

Using Description Effectively

 

Three suggestions will help you write description.

1. Descriptions must be ordered in some way, or readers run the risk of getting lost in the details. There are several techniques of ordering. You can provide an overview of what is being described followed by a description of its parts. Or, you can describe its most prominent features first and then turn your attention to smaller details. The latter is the method used by William Least Heat-Moon in PrairyErth to describe buildings that the Santa Fe Railroad built in the 1920s but that are now abandoned in the 1990s:

 

In the narrow river vales of the county, the fields lie in squares and rectangles of row crops, fence lines darkly outlining them with small trees; from above, in autumn, the pattern is of strips of plaid cloth showing through long rents in the burlap of the prairie. Beside one of these tears, which is the South Fork Valley, and up on its western terrace high enough to give a view down on the vale road and the cropped grids, sits a low stone building, gray and grim like a barracks. It has eight rooms, ten doors, five chimneys, and is built like a double-footed L on its side, and between the two longer end rooms is a roofed porch, and in front of it, a covered well. The stone blocks are, in fact, concrete cast to look like hewn rock. . . . No one has lived here in some years, but once five Hispanic families did, and now the ceilings are shucking off their plaster down to their thin lath ribs, dropping pieces onto a miscellany of piled junk; window lights are missing, doors tied shut with twists of wire, and dirt lies so caked to the floor that the cold wind stirs no grit as it haunts through and gives the place an occasional voice—a slapped gutter, a shaken door, a rattled pane.

—"En las Casitas," in PrairyErth (Boston:

Houghton Mifflin, 1991), p. 230.

 

2. In addition to being organized, descriptive details need to be concrete and specific. To describe what we see, hear, smell, and taste in order to enable readers to experience the sensations is difficult. Many inexperienced writers tend to use a lot of general terms and to rely heavily on adjectives and adverbs to make their descriptions more vivid. Of course, modifiers are sometimes important. But the key to achieving vividness is to use nouns and verbs that appeal directly to the senses.

 

General and not                  More specific, but                                Specific and

very descriptive                   relatively vague                                   descriptive

 

thick vegetation                   underbrush                                           kudzu and wild grape vines

 

journeyed with                     walked slowly                                       slogged

difficulty

 

The more concrete and specific the nouns and verbs, the more vivid and evocative the images become. Instead of writing Cyril journeyed with difficulty through the thick vegetation,” write, “Cyril slogged through the kudzu and wild grape vines.”

 

3. Much descriptive writing involves  orienting  readers  to  unfamiliar or unknown things. Familiar comparisons, especially analogies, are effective ways to assist readers in connecting the known to the unknown. In the following passage, the author uses the analogy of the human hand to describe the topography of the rectangular Chase County, Kansas:

 

Let this book page, appropriate as it is in shape and proportion, be Chase County. Lay your right hand across the page from right edge to left; tuck middle finger under palm and splay your other fingers wide so that your thumb points down, your little finger nearly upward. You have a configuration of the county watercourses, a manual topography of the place. Everything here has been and continues to be shaped by those four drainages: the South Fork of the Cottonwood River (thumb), the Cottonwood (index finger), Middle Creek (ring), Diamond Creek (little finger). Many more streams and brooks are here, but these four control the county. . . .                 —PrairyErth, p. 13.