A Meticulous Descriptive Quality

In his essay "Why I Write", George Orwell notes that his writing, even when he was a teen, strove to have "the same meticulous descriptive quality". One thing he means by this is that he always strove to detail the concrete particulars of the things he experienced. This is something I really like in Orwell, but it's something I appreciate in other writers and documentarians as well. A. J. Liebling's profiles in the New Yorker, for instance, are replete with precise (at least according to Liebling's biographer) quotations of the figures profiled. In his profile of Hymie Katz, for example, Liebling quotes someone saying of Katz that he "is a man what knows to get a dollar".

It's hard to capture a sentence like that without distorting it by correcting it or just remembering the gist of it. Similarly, it's hard to capture the concrete details of the mundane things that surround us in everyday life, just because we tend to take them for granted, or not even notice them at all. Nat's recent post about the paintings on the side of hot dog vans at the National Mall in DC is an exception in this regard, I think, because it succeeds at capturing some of these details--in all of their concrete particularity--and thereby achieves a certain meticulous descriptive quality, of a sort that Orwell might admire. Check it out.