Intuitive Type Writing (A Trip to a Flower Shop) — Example and Analysis

Let's examine a text written by an IEI person: A Trip to a Flower Shop. It is a vivid example of intuitive narration, despite its seemingly sensory theme — a trip to a store to buy plant pots. Let’s break down why:

1. Neglect of specifics and abundance of metaphors and abstract generalizations

The text is literally overflowing with imagery and metaphor:

“Inevitable like growing up, relentless like the end of life” — here, “floriculture” is immediately given a grand, hyperbolic meaning.
A sensory type would phrase it more simply: “Sooner or later everyone ends up taking care of plants.”

“A handful of olives rattling in a one-gallon jar” — an unusual comparison for a sensory thinker, since they tend to describe specific details of the environment (e.g., “The hall was rather empty, but a few shoppers wandered by the shelves”).

Notice how often the author uses vague, generalized formulations:

“There were pots galore — for every taste, color, shape, material, and price…”
A sensory description would be more concrete: “Most of the pots were ceramic, in pastel tones.”

“My colleagues switched to ‘I-totally-know-plants’ mode and off they went” — what exactly did they say? What were they discussing? We don’t know, because for an intuitive type, those specifics don’t matter — what matters in this case is the ironic observation itself.

In similar texts, sensory types tend to emphasize factual descriptions of the setting — for example, what kinds of plants were on the shelves, what materials the pots were made of, how soft the lighting was.

2. Narrative logic — leaps, abstractions, associations

The text isn’t built along an observable, sensory sequence (“we entered > we chose > we bought > we left”) but follows intuitive leaps — full of lyrical digressions and unexpected parallels:

• It begins with global philosophizing about “floriculture as destiny.”

• Then it jumps abruptly from colleagues to depressed plants, from pots to pesticides.

• Finally, it ends with musings about natural selection among plants and the “flower god.”

Source: S. Ionkin