ABSTRACT
We will now turn to our second major language function: description. It is important to distinguish between description and narration, although sometimes the two are classed together under some such heading as ‘reporting’ or even simply ‘describing’. As we have already seen, narration involves the concept of sequence, and not just any old sequence, but a particular order of events over time. There is, in short, a necessary logic to narration. With description, however, there is no hard and fast logical constraint on the organisation of what we write. There is, as we shall shortly see, a constraint on the kinds of thing we write about in a description; but there is no invariable, fixed order in which we should write about them.
