Descriptive Writing

English 28

Luis Cordova

What is descriptive writing?

More than other type of essays, descriptive essays strive to create a deeply involved and vivid experience for the reader. Great descriptive essays achieve this affect not through facts and statistics but by using detailed observations and descriptions.

As you get started on your descriptive essay, it's important for you to identify exactly what you want to describe. Often, a descriptive essay will focus on portraying one of the following:

a person, a place, a memory, an experience, an object

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What is description focus?

It's a great creative exercise to sit down and simply describe what you observe. However, when writing a descriptive essay, you often have a particular reason for writing your description. Getting in touch with this reason can help you focus your description and imbue your language with a particular perspective or emotion.

Example: Imagine that you want to write a descriptive essay about your grandfather. You've chosen to write about your grandfather's physical appearance and the way that he interacts with people. However, rather than providing a general description of these aspects, you want to convey your admiration for his strength and kindness. This is your reason for writing the descriptive essay. To achieve this, you might focus one of your paragraphs on describing the roughness of his hands, roughness resulting from the labor of his work throughout his life, but you might also describe how he would hold your hands so gently with his rough hands when having a conversation with you or when taking a walk.

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How should you write your description?

If there's one thing you should remember as you write your descriptive essay, it's the famous saying: show don't tell. But what's the difference between showing and telling?

Consider these two simple examples:

1. I grew tired after dinner.

2. As I leaned back and rested my head against the top of the chair, my eyelids began to feel heavy, and the edges of the empty plate in front of me blurred with the white tablecloth.

The first sentence tells readers that you grew tired after dinner. The second sentence shows readers that you grew tired. The most effective descriptive essays are loaded with such showing because they enable readers to imagine or experience something for themselves.

As you write your descriptive essay, the best way to create a vivid experience for your readers is to focus on the five senses: Sight, sound, smell, touch, taste

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Dominant Description

The quality, mood, or atmosphere that the writer emphazises.

Decide what dominant impression you want to convey.

This is the idea that your whole description will be built around.

To choose a dominant impression, consider: when you look at your subject, what catches you eye? What do you notice most? What makes this person, place or object distinctive and unlike others? Focus your description around what stands out.

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Quick Tips for Writing Your Descriptive Essay

Writing a descriptive essay can be a rich and rewarding experience, but it can also feel a bit complicated. It's helpful, therefore, to keep a quick checklist of the essential questions to keep in mind as you plan, draft, and revise your essay.

Planning your descriptive essay:

What or who do you want to describe?

What is your reason for writing your description?

What are the particular qualities that you want to focus on?

Drafting your descriptive essay:

What sights, sounds, smells, tastes, and textures are important for developing your description?

Which details can you include to ensure that your readers gain a vivid impression imbued with your emotion or perspective?

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Revising your descriptive essay:Have you provided enough details and descriptions to enable your readers to gain a complete and vivid perception?

Have you left out any minor but important details?

Have you used words that convey your emotion or perspective?

Are there any unnecessary details in your description?

Does each paragraph of your essay focus on one aspect of your description?

Are your paragraphs ordered in the most effective way?

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Descriptive ParagraphSample 1.The sample below is an opening paragraph from a student essay on the development of entertainment media. In it, she describes TV-watching in her family to make a point about how central TV was as a form of entertainment in the 60’s.

(1) As I was growing up in the 60’s, television was the only entertainment my family knew of the electronic sort. (2) The 7 o’clock nightly news was such an important part of our family that my dad knocked a wall down and built a huge cabinet in its place just to accommodate our 19-inch black and white. (3) No one was allowed to talk or make a sound when the television was on; all eyes were glued to the moving and flickering image. The box commanded absolute respect.(4) In the daytime, “the television needs its rest” my mother would say, as she patted its pseudo-wooden top and covered it with a doilie she had made herself. (5)There is no doubt that TV was as central to our lives as it was to the lives of all our friends during that period. (adapted from an essay by Angeline Chan, used with permission.)

Notice the writer’s use of action verbs (knocked, glued) and her use of sensory words (19- inch, black and white, huge, talk, sound, flickering)) to paint a picture of the scene in her living room. In the final sentence, she states the main point of the paragraph: that TV was central in families’ lives during the 60’s. The appearance of a topic sentence at the end of a paragraph, rather than at the beginning is common in descriptive paragraphs, and it works well for this kind of development.

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FinaL POINTS- Be careful that the details in your description don’t conflict. Even one detail that works against the dominant impression will confuse readers and interfere with your point. Also, remember that what you think of as a good thing, another person might see as negative. So be sure that your language clearly conveys your attitude.

- Don't confuse describing with making value judgments. Remember that the primary goal of description is to convey sensory information. You can't describe a town, for example, just by saying that it's a nice place. You have to give physical details like the size of the town, its layout, the style of the buildings, etc. The best descriptive writing creates a clear image in the reader's mind. Readers can then decide for themselves that it's a nice town.

- Convey sensory detail by telling readers how your senses reacted to it. You might write that the sunlight was so bright it made you squint. This is an experience your readers have had, so this will make them feel like they’re seeing the sunlight too.

TIP: This technique is especially useful in describing smell, which can be challenging. There are a limited number of words to describe scent: pungent, heavy, smoky, for example. For a more captivating description, write how the smell makes your nose feel. For instance: The smell seemed to stick in the back of your throat. Or scratch your throat, make your eyes water, your nose run, etc.

- Use comparisons to convey sensory detail. When you really can’t find a word to describe a sensory detail, or you’ve run out of words, you can describe one thing by comparing it to another. You might write that the medicine tasted like molten metal, for example. Or the sweater was as soft as your cat’s fur.

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