---
title: Adding descriptions
summary: Add descriptions to just about anything in your schema to improve your developer experience
---
# Working with generic types

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## Adding descriptions

One of the great features of a schema-backed API is that it is self-documenting. Many
API developers choose to maximise the benefit of this by adding descriptions to some or
all of the components of their schema.

The trade-off for using descriptions is that the YAML configuration becomes a bit more verbose.

Let's add some descriptions to our types and fields.

**app/_graphql/schema.yml**
```yaml
  types:
    Country:
      description: A record that describes one of the world's sovereign nations
      fields:
        code:
          type: String!
          description: The unique two-letter country code
        name:
          type: String!
          description: The canonical name of the country, in English
```

We can also add descriptions to our query arguments. We'll have to remove the inline argument
definition to do that.

**app/_graphql/schema.yml**
```yaml
  queries:
    readCountries:
      type: '[Country]'
      description: Get all the countries in the world
      args:
        limit:
          type: Int = 20
          description: The limit that is applied to the result set
```

### Further reading

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