A description is an enumeration of the features or characteristics of something or someone, developed through language. According to its properties, the description can be qualified in different ways.
Subjective description is the one in which the subjectivity of the individual it describes is explicit. It should be remembered that the subjective is something related to the subject’s way of feeling or thinking: that is, it is not linked to the object itself.
A subjective description, therefore, conveys the person’s feelings and thoughts, unlike what happens with an objective description (which tries to get as close as possible to reality, leaving personal opinions and considerations aside).
Suppose a young man, describing the house he just bought, tells his friends: “It’s a beautiful house, fit for a king. Its dimensions are so large that an elephant would feel comfortable in it. And its design is typical of a top-level artist”. As can be seen, the boy makes a subjective description since he uses qualifying adjectives and presents sensations that may or may not be shared.
Another person, on the other hand, could choose to make an objective description: “It is a house with an area of 120 square meters, with a mosaic floor, brick walls and a tiled roof. ” In this case, there is no subjectivity in the description, but only objective data appears.
It should be noted that, when the subjective description uses poetic language or rhetorical devices, a literary description can also result: “She was a woman whose emerald eyes pierced the soul, with a magical smile that displayed countless perfect pearls and hair that seemed to be made of rays of the sun”.
Literary figures, therefore, usually appear in these types of descriptions, and among them are metaphor, comparison, and hyperbole. The intention of including them is to ensure that the text enjoys a greater degree of beauty, but also a certain rhythm, something that can give it a lot of personality.
Given that each individual, of all the species on the planet, perceives reality in a particular way and as valid as that of any other, and that the description is nothing more than a drawing with words of said reality, we could say that not even the objective description absolutely lacks subjectivity. As much as we rely on units of measurement to talk about the dimensions of a house or even the body mass of a given object, these units were created by human beings, arbitrarily, and someone could consider them inaccurate or invalid.
How are living beings and things around us? Do we know what our friends, our house, ourselves are like? Of course they do, as well as the others know it, although probably the description that each one gives is different. When someone makes a subjective description, he makes it clear that his priority is not the precision of the forms or the issues of physics, but his point of view and his emotions.
Just as the object of the subjective description loses importance in the face of the sender’s intentions to express his own feelings, it is important that the receiver is the right one. In this case, it should be someone who does not expect a list of physical and chemical properties, which can be measured using scientific tools, but a series of personal opinions that he may or may not share, but which will give him a point of view. unique. It is also essential to use language that the other party can understand, and this applies to any type of description.
