Energeia
Vivid description that makes an absent scene feel present to the audience.
Energeia is the quality of language that puts a thing before the eyes. Aristotle used the phrase "bringing before the eyes" in the Rhetoric to describe expressions that make an audience see rather than merely understand.
It works through concrete, sensory particulars in the present tense, and through selecting the one detail that implies the rest. Abstraction and summary destroy it.
Later handbooks folded it together with enargeia, a related term for vividness. The practical craft is the same: replace the general with the specific until the reader stops reading and starts watching.
Common mistake: piling on adjectives. Vividness comes from precise nouns and verbs; adjective stacking slows the sentence and pushes the reader back out of the scene.
“The chair was still warm.”
Keep reading the glossary
A figure in which the speaker gives voice to an absent, dead, or non-human entity, letting it speak in the first person.
Refining the same idea by restating it in varied forms.
A figure in which points already made are gathered and restated in a compressed rush at the end of an argument.
A figure of speech that describes one thing as if it were another.