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Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/33426
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/33426
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

One of the things you discover pretty quickly as a writer is that there are all kinds of things that we do not have words for. Worse, even if there were words of them, most people would not recognize what they meant. (How many people know what it means to say that someone stands with arms akimbo?)

The truth is that most readers have pretty limited use vocabularies -- words they recognized easily -- and that if you use words they don't recognize you will lose them pretty quickly.

This is why good writers handle these situations by telling micro-stories that appeal to the readers memory. So you might say something like:

> Tom stood like a man awaiting the sentence of a grim-faced judge.

All description works through an appeal to memory. After all, all we have is words. We can't actually show anything. All we can do is use words or stories that evoke images from the reader's memory. And with so few words available for general use, stories have to carry most of the burden of evoking memory. Fortunately, this is something that stories are very good at.

Original score: 9