A lot description is not an advertisement and it is not an essay. It is a working document read in ninety seconds by a buyer deciding whether to bid, and read again by a lawyer if that buyer is disappointed. Everything good about catalogue language comes from holding those two readers in mind at once: enough desire to bring someone into the room, enough precision that nothing in the notice can be argued with afterwards.
The title carries the sale
A catalogue title is the only part of your notice that many buyers will read. It has a fixed grammar in every serious house, and the order matters: object type, principal material, style or period, date range. "Louis-Philippe mahogany commode, French, circa 1840" tells a specialist almost everything they need to filter on, in eight words.
Resist two temptations. The first is decoration — "a superb and rare commode" adds nothing a photograph does not say better, and it costs you the words you need for facts. The second is over-specification: a date you cannot defend is a liability, and "circa 1840" is stronger than "1838" unless something in the object says 1838. Where an attribution is genuinely uncertain, the trade's hedges exist precisely for this: attributed to, in the manner of, after, in the taste of. Each has a settled meaning; use them as they are meant, and buyers will trust the ones you leave off.
The description: form, then material, then decoration
The body of a notice reads best when it moves the way an eye moves over the object. Begin with overall form and structure — the commode is rectangular, it has four graduated long drawers, it stands on shaped bracket feet. Then materials and construction, including secondary woods, joins, backing, hardware. Then decoration and surface: veneers, mounts, inlay, gilding, glazing. Then origin and date, then anything that anchors the object in a documented history — a stamp, a label, a foundry mark, a related example in a public collection.
Keep sentences declarative. A catalogue paragraph rarely needs a subordinate clause: the object supplies the drama, and the writer's job is to get out of the way. Avoid comparatives you cannot support — finer, earlier, more important — unless you can name what it is finer than. And write only what is in front of you. If the interior of a drawer is not photographed and you did not open it, the notice does not describe it.
Condition language is a promise
Condition is where notices generate complaints, and where careful language earns its keep. A condition narrative should be factual, neutral and complete on the visible: "light wear consistent with age; two minor veneer lifts to the left side; brass escutcheons appear to be later replacements." Note the shape of that last clause — appear to be — which reports an observation without claiming an inspection you did not make.
Three habits protect you. Describe rather than grade: "a 4 cm loss to the front edge" survives scrutiny, "good condition" does not. State the scope of your looking — under UV, unframed, not removed from the mount — so that the buyer knows what was checked. And never let the condition narrative contradict the photographs; a buyer who finds a chip that the images show and the text omits will assume the omission was deliberate.
Keywords and the sale after the sale
Most bidders now arrive through a search box rather than a printed page, which means every notice needs the words a stranger would type. Four to eight keywords covering object type, material, period, maker or school, and the region are usually enough. They belong in a field of their own, not smuggled into the prose, where they would damage the register you spent the paragraph building.
The same discipline serves the archive. A house that writes structured notices — the same fields, in the same order, in the same language — accumulates something valuable: a searchable record of what it has sold, in a form that can be compared, reused and, later, published. Houses that write free-form paragraphs accumulate paragraphs.
A working order
In practice the fastest route through a lot is this. Photograph it properly first, including marks and damages. Write the title. Write the description in the order above. Write the condition narrative while still holding the object. Add keywords last, when you know what the object is. Then read the whole notice once as a buyer and once as an opponent.
This is also, deliberately, the order Catalot writes in. The engine produces the same fields in the same sequence from your photographs and your note, and it hedges rather than invents when the image does not support a claim. What it gives you is a first draft in the right shape and the right register — the twenty minutes of assembly, removed. The judgement, the attribution and the estimate stay exactly where they belong: with you.