Writing a Winning Composition: Lessons from the Art
Does the phrase “A picture is worth a thousand words” sound all too familiar to you? Famous artists in history employed different strategies to pique the interest of their audience, making their artwork highly regarded by many. Now, let’s take a quick look on the different styles and pick up a couple of pointers that we can use in writing our composition assignment.
Impressionism was prominent in France between 1870s and 1880s, with renowned artists such as Claude Monet. Impressionist paintings are characterized by their visible brush strokes, unusual visual angles and a strong emphasis on lighting effect. The overall result is a fleeting sensory experience that is highly scintillating to the brain.
Monet’s Impression, Sunrise (1872)
As a writer, you can make use of metaphors and figurative language to allow readers to form a more loose interpretation of the subject matters. While this style of writing is often employed in creative writing, you must exercise caution when using words that are ambiguous in nature. Best avoided if the question specifies that you must write in a descriptive/objective/expository manner.
Pointillism, as the name suggests, is a technique of painting that involves small, distinct dots of pure color in patterns in order to form an image analogous to what a regular colour inkjet printer would produce (with bigger and more distinct dots). The result: a unique grainy sensation that gives body to the overall theme.
Georges Seurat’s Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, 1886
Just as the smaller, distinct dots give more substance to the big picture, you may accentuate the details in your writing to substantiate your point. Use elaboration, examples and figures to help the audience concur with your point. Otherwise, your statement may be dismissed as a mere opinion.
Cubism was a 20th century avant-garde art movement, pioneered by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque. Cubist artworks break objects up and analyze their parts from different angles and perspectives before finally assembling them back in an abstracted form. One effect you would expect to see in a Cubist painting: a perception of depth and thought-provoking edges in a nonetheless 2-dimensional canvass.
Pablo Picasso’s Le Guitariste (1910)
Interested in adopting the cubist strategy in your writing? Think what is at the heart of your sentence. Break them down to pieces. Replace that multiple adjectives or adverbs with strong verbs and nouns. Pack equal or more punch in shorter words. Compare “the tall, dark and handsome man ran quickly to save the drowning lady in distress” with “the lifeguard raced to Eva’s rescue”. “The lifeguard” would evoke a completely different image in your readers’ minds, and it would likely be a stronger image than “the tall, dark and handsome man”.
Op-Art, also known as optical art, it is a style of visual art that makes use of optical illusions. Illusions of movement include, but not restrictive to: flashing, swelling, warping, rotating, vibrating among other things. The effect: a groundbreaking experience in that stimulates our nerves in a titillating manner.
Examples of Op-Art pictures. Do you feel that the squares in the first picture are moving and that the curves in the second picture are rotating in opposite directions? The third picture really consists of equal-sized squares!
Now if you notice, the illusions of motion in Op-Art paintings arise due to the use of highly contrasting colours. Similarly, you should make use of the different perspectives, even the seemingly contradictory ones, to make your writing more interesting. Lop-sided composition bores the readers as it shows the writers’ negligence to the nuances in the topic. Beware of writing self-defeating arguments, nonetheless. It makes no sense to write “I agree to capital punishment but I despise capital punishment.” Contrast the elements of the overarching ideas instead, to maneuver around your argument: “While capital punishment incapacitates the criminals from committing any further crimes, a justification for its enactment, it must be acknowledged that there is no such thing as a humane method of putting a person to death, irrespective of the manner of the execution.” You may still craft your stand at this point (for or against), but make sure your stand is coherent throughout your composition.
1) Use metaphors, idioms, parables and other form of figurative language to invoke reader’s emotions. Do not tell them what to feel, reel them into it.
2) Accentuate the details with description, elaboration, real-world examples or statistics to substantiate your point.
3) Focus on interesting nouns and verbs. Are there long sentences that can be broken down to smaller, more digestible bits? Short words have more punch. They put things in motion.
4) Different perspectives make your piece of writing richer and fluid. In creative writing, you may twist the events to create page-turning literary illusions. (Consider Rowling’s ambiguous depiction of Snape in the Harry Potter series)
