From Sol Stein's "On Writing": What we mean by “dry” is that it does not enable us to see as we read, it does not move us, and, most important, it does not stimulate our intellect with insight, its ostensible purpose.
Dry writing fails because it gives the mind nothing to hold. Insight without image is just a claim you're asked to trust, and readers stop trusting claims that arrive with no texture. A sentence that shows you the thing lets you verify the insight yourself, which is why it lands harder. Say you want to explain that grief dulls routine — instead of stating this, show someone microwaving the same meal three nights running, not tasting any of it. The insight arrives through the picture, unforced.
The caution: don't confuse vividness with decoration. Piling on sensory detail for its own sake creates a different kind of dryness, one that's busy but still empty. Every image needs to be doing the thinking, not just dressing up a sentence that had nothing to say.
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