For a moment all I could do was feel the pounding. Like a funeral procession, it beat slow and powerful. Every beat was a hammer against my hollow body. Nothing truly existed outside of the sensation for what felt like innumerable lifetimes. My taste came back to me like the slow ebb of the tide. Metallic mint. An unusual but not surprising mix; nothing surprises me right now. A gooey object falls from my mouth held agape. It took the mint away. I hold out for as long as possible, but whatever is trickling over my eye is too much. I wipe the stream away with a hand that screams for stillness. The view is incredible and fleeting as it is blurred once again with the red stream. A crumpled white sack sits before my eye smeared in red as vivid as a sunset over an ocean of shattered glass and crunched steel. Flashes of blue intermingle with the red destruction. Back and forth the colors dance, and it is only now that I begin to hear their shrieking music. The whine is almost unbearable, and yet there is a comfort to its obnoxiousness. I can finally release to the enveloping pain that is ripping apart my body. It all dims into the blackness of the pain. I smile a bloody, broken smile. It’s going to be ok.
The paragraph above uses the writing technique of sensory detail and diction. The piece describes a car crash in all the detail and sensations that would conceivably fit into a single paragraph. Sensory details are a literary technique that can greatly improve a description and help the author to truly show and not tell, when describing an event or place. A car crash is a wealth of sensory details, as your entire body is affected by the event. The sensory details are separated in this particular paragraph in order to try and help the reader focus on each one and not be overwhelmed by all that truly is happening in the scene. A specific example of sensory details is shown when describing the heartbeat in the very beginning. By never directly calling the sensation a heartbeat the reader is forced to imagine the pulse, hard and slow, as if a methodical hammer against their body. This type of sensory detail impacts the audience as it throws them into the scene whether they want to or not. The detail of the passage is what makes it real to the reader. A car crash is something we have all seen; we can fill in the very basics of what it is. To simply say that the first sensation was his heartbeat does not do the character of the scene any justice to what was really being felt. The character did not feel a heartbeat, but a hammer, even if the audience knows that in reality it was his heart and not a hammer pounding into him. Sensory detail is a powerful tool in which when done correctly can help authors transport their readers into the world of the passage and all that it entails, the beauty and the pain.
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I agree with the statement that says “Sensory details are a literary technique that can greatly improve a description and help the author to truly show and not tell…” In the sample paragraph, sentences such as “Every beat was a hammer against my hollow body,” and “A crumpled white sack sits before my eye smeared in red as vivid as a sunset over an ocean of shattered glass and crunched steel,” sensory detail and word choice really help the author to show what is happening in the paragraph, not just tell. Also, the author does not directly name anything in the paragraph, but rather describes it in great detail. For example, instead of just saying “my gum fell out of my mouth,” the author says “A gooey object falls from my mouth held agape.” This technique makes the reader think hard about that is happening in the paragraph and makes them feel as if they are actually there experiencing the car crash. Well done.
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