Suggestiveness

Definition and stakes

Portrait of John Burroughs John Burroughs,  Literary values and other papers (1902)

“ In literature perspective, indirection, understatement, side glimpses, have equal value; a vocabulary that is warm from the experience of the writer, sentences that start a multitude of images, that abound in the concrete and the specific, that shun vague generalities,—with these go the power of suggestiveness.
Beginnings, outlines, summaries, are suggestive, while the elaborated, the highly wrought, the perfected afford us a different kind of pleasure. The art that fills and satisfies us has one excellence, and the art that stimulates and makes us ahunger has another.
”
Source: Gutenberg

Portrait of Arlo Bates Arlo Bates,  Talks on Writing English. First Series

“ The moment a likeness is suggested, the mind of the reader is led to make the comparison, and is thus alive and alert; while in each case the figure suggests far more than any bare statement of fact. Since the secret of Force lies in connotation, in the suggestiveness which leads the mind onward into the mood so that it seems to itself to originate the ideas which are really given to it directly or indirectly by the author, it follows that in the use of figures is one of the most effectual means of securing this quality. ”
Source: Gutenberg

Get perspective with Kwize: daily news enlightened by great literature