How do you describe details of an object visually?

When writing in the first person, how do you visually describe details of a specific object, such as words written on a piece of paper?

Take this for example:

What was his name? That's something he never bothered with before - something completely irrelevant to him over the past few days. He looked around the room for ideas, his eyes landing on a scrap of paper half torn vertically with rough handwritten letters, the second halves of the words showing.

'Ress.'

'En.'

"I - my name is Ressen."

The primary issues with this is that is that I want to reveal a piece of information, primarily the letters 'Ress' and 'En' that appear above and below each other respectively. However, I'm unsure of the correct way to format this. I have seen that some authors center the text that they are aiming to convey through an image of the paper that's ripped, with the text inside of it. However, I also see some authors do what I have included in my example, and others centering it.

Is there some kind of universal method to do something like this?

posted almost 8 years ago

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Kyle Li‭

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