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Paragraph - Details: Encyclopedia II - Paragraph - Details

In literature, a detail is a small piece of information within a paragraph. A detail usually exists to support or explain a main idea. In the following excerpt from Dr. Samuel Johnson's Lives of the English Poets, the first sentence is the main idea, that Joseph Addison is a skilled "describer of life and manners". The succeeding sentences are details that support and explain the main idea in specific way. As a describer of life and manners, he must be allowed to stand perhaps the first of the first rank. Hi ...

Paragraph: Encyclopedia II - Paragraph - Details

Paragraph - Details

In literature, a detail is a small piece of information within a paragraph. A detail usually exists to support or explain a main idea.

In the following excerpt from Dr. Samuel Johnson's Lives of the English Poets, the first sentence is the main idea, that Joseph Addison is a skilled "describer of life and manners". The succeeding sentences are details that support and explain the main idea in specific way.

As a describer of life and manners, he must be allowed to stand perhaps the first of the first rank. His humour, which, as Steele observes, is peculiar to himself, is so happily diffused as to give the grace of novelty to domestic scenes and daily occurrences. He never "o'ersteps the modesty of nature," nor raises merriment or wonder by the violation of truth. His figures neither divert by distortion nor amaze by aggravation. He copies life with so much fidelity that he can be hardly said to invent; yet his exhibitions have an air so much original, that it is difficult to suppose them not merely the product of imagination.