Introduce before you elaborate
Six lines describing a square. Put them into the order that lets a stranger follow — the articles will tell you.
- The church is open on Tuesdays only, for reasons nobody has ever explained to me.
- It did not work, and now everybody sits on the low wall behind them.
- There is a square at the bottom of the town, roughly triangular, which nobody calls a triangle.
- The benches were turned round in 2009 so that people would look at the church instead of the bank.
- On its north side there is a church, and on the south side a bank that used to be a different bank.
- Between the two there are four benches, three of which face the wrong way.
Somebody describing a place well
The waterfront, spoken
If you stand with your back to the water, there are three things in front of you and they are all on the same street.
On the left there’s a chandlery — that’s a shop that sells rope and paint and things for boats — which has been there since before anybody’s memory and is somehow still open. In the middle there’s a café with six tables outside, four of which are usable, because the other two are in the wind. On the right there’s a gap where a building was, and in the gap there’s a car park that holds eleven cars and is free. It is the only free parking in the town, and it is the reason people are unpleasant to each other in August.
Behind those three the town goes uphill, in one street that bends twice. You cannot see the top from the bottom.
The harbour itself is smaller than people expect. There are two arms of stone, one long and one short, and the short one is where everybody fishes, because it is where the mackerel come.
The thing I would tell you is that none of this looks like anything until about six in the evening.
Three questions about how the description is built.
1. How does it open?
2. Every new thing arrives with a or there’s a. Why?
3. Why the harbour, the water and the town with no introduction?
Four moves of a place description
The description made four moves: put the listener somewhere and face them · introduce things in a fixed order, each one new · one detail that could only be true of this place · what it is actually like, which is never the same as what it looks like.
The third move is what stops a description sounding like an estate agent.
Eight phrases. Match each to the move it makes.
Two minutes of assembly
Eight sentences from a description given to somebody who has never been. Choose the article.
1. There is ___ bridge at the bottom of the hill. (first mention)
2. ___ bridge is closed to cars on Sundays.
3. We used to swim in ___ river below it.
4. ___ life there was arranged around the tide.
5. It is ___ smallest harbour on that coast.
6. There is ___ café with six tables and a dog.
7. My grandmother lived on ___ same street for sixty years.
8. ___ tourists come in August and leave in September.
Five sentences of the kind that appear when somebody is describing and monitoring at once.
1. You come out of the station and there is the small square in front of you. — first mention
2. The people there are very welcoming. — people in general
3. We swam in river every evening.
4. It is a oldest building in the town.
5. The my aunt still lives on that street.
Describe it. Then look at the map they drew.
How the twenty-six minutes run. Four minutes alone, twelve in pairs — six each way — then eight comparing the two maps, and two to move between them.
Stage 1 · Alone · 4 minutes
Choose one place small enough to be described completely: a square, a street, a yard, a station, a room you spent years in.
Four minutes of notes. Positions, not sentences.
- Decide where the listener will be standing and which way they face. Write it down first.
- List between four and seven things, in the order you will introduce them.
- Mark one detail that could only be true of this place.
- Mark one thing that has changed, and one thing that has not.
Stage 2 · Pairs · 6 minutes each · Speaking and drawing
Describe your place to somebody who has never been. While you speak, they draw it.
Six minutes of continuous description. The listener draws and does not speak.
- Speaker: put them somewhere, face them, then introduce things one at a time.
- Listener: draw. You may not ask questions. If you cannot tell which thing is meant, put a question mark on the map and keep going.
- Speaker: use the third and fourth moves. A map with no life on it is only half the task.
- Listener: every question mark you draw is a place where you could not identify what was meant. Do not say so yet.
Stage 3 · Both maps · 8 minutes
Put the two maps in front of you and find every question mark and every mistake.
Four minutes each. For every error, find the sentence that caused it.
- For each question mark: what did the speaker say, and what would have made it identifiable?
- For each thing in the wrong place: was it introduced before it was located, or located before it was introduced?
- Count the errors that came from an article — a the for something the listener had never met, or an a for something they had.
- Then say the corrected sentence out loud. Not the rule. The sentence.
Where the map went wrong
Two questions.
1. Most question marks appeared where…
2. What does the map show you that a correction could not?
Introduce, then identify
Two questions. Twenty seconds.
1. When describing a place to somebody who has never been, what does everything start with?
2. Which things can take the from the very first sentence?
Next. Why an article error is the only kind that costs you nothing at all — and the two habits that put the cost back.