Intuitive Type Speech (Childhood Memories, Favorite Places, and Things) — Example and Analysis

Let’s analyze this text: Childhood Memories, Favorite Places, and Things. It is a good example of intuitive narration.

This is how she begins to describe the house:

"A very big house with a huge number of rooms that connected with each other. In each room there was something interesting. Some kind of interesting wardrobe..., some kind of... boxes were there..."

The description is very abstract. For the young woman, the house from her dream was something vivid and interesting, but only a general image remained in her mind. There is no focus on details. Let’s listen further:

"The rooms there were connected like a chain. You could go from one room to another, but there wasn't any single room with a bunch of doors. Just, like, they connected... like train cars."

The intuitive type attempts to describe the layout of the house and, unsure of how to convey it more clearly to the listener, resorts to two apt comparisons at once—train cars and a chain.

"These rooms really resembled Crimean museums of famous writers."

Another comparison. However, this time the intuitive type draws from her own memory, recalling what a museum looks like so that the listener can catch the mental image.

Generally, it is highly telling that the young woman chose to describe her dream—something that didn't exist in reality. After all, a dream, being something immaterial, is very difficult to capture in words.

Next, she begins to describe a real place—her parents' garden.

"Our garden plot was located on the very last line, and behind it there was a steppe like that. Why did I like it? Because if you turned away from these garden plots and looked into the steppe, it felt like there was no one else. If you walk a bit further, you get the feeling that there is no one else, you are alone in the steppe. For many hundreds of kilometers there’s no one."

And once again, there is a total lack of specifics and details. She conveys her state of mind through the sensation of emptiness. We only catch the general picture, the overall image. There are no sensory descriptions of smells, sounds, or colors. The intuitive type simply does not place emphasis on them.

Source: S. Ionkin