Describing common hand gestures
While writing stories how do I describe the action of common hand gestures, for instance the "come on" signal.
Is there any reference? I found a list of hand gestures in wikipedia but obviously it's not geared to writers so no descriptive text examples.
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The best way to describe a gesture is how the body physically moves to make that gesture. Here's a few examples:
Telling someone to come here
He swept his hand toward his body.
Flashing the okay sign
He put his forefinger to his thumb forming an o and raised his other three fingers.
Giving thumbs up
He turned his hand, clenched his fingers toward his palm, and pointed his thumb skyward.
This post was sourced from https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/8563. It is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.
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In many cases you don't actually need, or necessarily want, to describe the gesture itself. It is often enough, or even preferable, to (a) convey that there was a gesture and (b) convey its meaning, without describing the gesture. There are at least two reasons for this:
The gesture is idiomatic and a specific description would just get in the way. "He gave her a quick thumbs-up" will be understood by most, but a description of how he held his hand and extended his thumb upward will be somewhere between tedious and opaque to the reader.
The gesture is not universal. I've been told that the American "come here" gesture means something different in other places, and that in at least one country (Italy) you signal "come here" by holding your hand differently (palm down rather than up). Describing the gesture wouldn't necessarily tell the reader what you meant. In cases like that it is better to say something like "he beckoned to her to join him" or "he signaled her to join him".
How does writing in your native language handle gestures? Are you used to reading physical descriptions of gestures in place of their meanings? Even when the language varies, you can take your cues from how others handle this problem in your field/location/market.
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