How to Write the Brief Description of the Drawings Section. Episode 16

Writing the Brief Description of the Drawings

This section should be the easiest part of your patent application to write because you’re just writing one sentence about each of the figures. I discussed what goes into patent figures in Episode 13 of the podcast, so go back and listen to that episode if you haven’t heard it.

No matter how many figures you have, you start the section by writing:

“Figure 1 is a…,” and then you simply state what it is. You should also specify what kind of view the figure represents.

For example, if you refer back to the avocado slicer patent I’ve mentioned before—U.S. Patent 8,726,799—you’ll see that the heading for this section is called “Brief Description of the Drawings.” Under this heading, you’ll find a list of the figures. I’m just going to read the first four; I won’t read all of them because this section is pretty simple and straightforward:

• FIG. 1 is a bottom perspective view of an avocado pitting device according to one embodiment of the present disclosure.

• FIG. 2 is a top perspective view of the avocado pitting device of FIG. 1.

• FIG. 3 is a top perspective view of an avocado pitting device according to another embodiment of the present disclosure.

• FIG. 4 is a bottom view of the avocado pitting device of FIG. 3.

There isn’t much detail in this section. It just describes the view and states that it represents an embodiment of the invention.

All the detail goes into the section I discussed in the last episode, which is the Detailed Description of the Embodiments.

Standard Views in Patent Figures

Some standard views include:

• Top view

• Bottom view

• Side view

• Front view

• Rear view

• Perspective views

• Cross-sectional views

You can also have exploded views, which show all the individual pieces of your invention separated from each other. There are variations of these views, but these are the main ones.

Final Thoughts

That’s pretty much it for this section. As I said, there’s not much to it—it’s easy to do once you have the figures completed.

The order in which you write this section doesn’t really matter. As long as you have the figure, just write a simple one-sentence description.

In the next episode, I’m going to continue discussing the details of each section of the patent application. The next topic will be the Background of the Invention.

I’m Adam Diament, and until next time—keep on inventing!