Descriptive Writing

Objectives

By the end of the lesson, students should be able to :• Understand the essential techniques of

writing a good descriptive piece,

• Know the various ways in which vocabulary can enrich a given text,

• Understand how too much description becomes redundant.

Painting a picture with words

• An effective written description is one that presents a clear picture to your reader.

• A successful description uses vivid vocabulary, including colorful adjectives and figurative language.

• An interesting description attracts the readers’ attention.

Imagery• Imagery is the use of words to create images, or

mental pictures. Imagery helps you picture how something: Looks Feels Smells Tastes Sounds

• Can you imagine a car journey? What might you see, touch, smell, taste and hear?• See: Like a fiery red fist, the Ferrari Testarossa punched its way past our

ageing Ford Fiesta...• Touch: the open window allowed a cool spring breeze to caress my cheeks• Smell: an ancient jalopy of a school bus spluttered along in front of us

spewing out nauseous black clouds of exhaust...• Taste: the bitter taste of the pre-trip travel sickness pill still clung to back of

my throat.• Hear: the screeching siren of an ambulance forced us to pull in and wait till

it passed...

‘Dark shapes glide through the night sky on silent wings, their sinister shadows outlined against the light of the full moon. Swooping down to the earth, they hover near houses and deserted buildings, breaking the peace of the night with their disturbing presence. Carriers of disease, drinkers of blood, companions of witches and demons, bats – the very word brings a shiver of fear to most people.’ - Sylvia A. Johnson, Bats.

Anybody could see how cold it got. The wind already had glass edges to it, stiffening muscles and practically cutting through the stitches of our clothes. When it blew, the chill stabbed our teeth like icicles, and our voices jiggled every time we talked.’ – Victor Martinez, Parrot in the Oven: Mi Vada.

Examples of Vivid Description

The villa was small and square, standing in its tiny garden with an air of pink-faceddetermination. Its shutters had been faded by the sun to a delicate creamy-green,cracked and bubbled in places. The garden, surrounded by tall fuchsia hedges, had the flower beds worked in complicated geometrical patterns, marked with smooth white stones. The white cobbled paths, scarcely as wide as a rake’s head, wound laboriously round beds hardly larger than a big straw hat, beds in the shape of stars, half-moons, triangles, and circles all overgrown with a shaggy tangle of flowers run wild. Roses dropped petals that seemed as big and smooth as saucers, flame-red, moon-white, glossy, and unwrinkled; marigolds like broods of shaggy suns stood watching their parent’s progress through the sky. The warm air was thick with the scent of a hundred dying flowers, and full of the gentle, soothing whisper and murmur of insects. – Gerald Durell, My Family and Other Animals.

It was a town of red brick, or of brick that would have been red if the smoke and ashes had allowed it; but as matters stood, it was a town of unnatural red and black like the painted face of a savage. It was a town of machinery and tall chimneys, out of which interminable serpents of smoke trailed themselves for ever and ever, and never got uncoiled. It had a black canal in it, and a river that ran purple with ill-smelling dye, and vast piles of building full of windows where there was a rattling and a trembling all day long, and where the piston of the steam-engine worked monotonously up and down, like the head of an elephant in a state of melancholy madness. It contained several large streets all very like one another, and many small streets still more like one another, inhabited by people equally like one another, who all went in and out at the same hours, with the same sound upon the same pavements, to do the same work, and to whom every day was the same as yesterday and tomorrow, and every year the counterpart of the last and the next. – Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities.

Techniques for Descriptive Writing

• Imagine yourself to be a kind of 'human video camera‘: Imagine you are going to 'record' what was in the particular scene or situation the question asks you to describe.

• Describe - as appropriate to the scene - what you saw, heard, tasted, smelt and felt - that is, use sensory description.

• Write about a past event using past tense verbs throughout! • While using the present tense, it's far too easy to forget

the time frame and flip back into using past tense verbs without realising. This is poor style, very confusing for the reader and worst of all... will lose m-a-n-y marks!

• Use precise vocabulary; the kind of words that almost contain their own description and which etch themselves into the mind of your reader.

• Avoid excessive, flat or boring description.

Cool water flows through the rocky banks of the creek and into a wide pond. Reeds and cattails surrounding the bank embrace the pond like a mother’s enfolding arms reaching out to caress her sleeping child. Like a beaming proud mother’s eye, the sun drenches the scene with its loving warmth. Just beneath the sparkling surface of the water, minnows shoot from rock to rock like silver darts thrust like scattershot by some unseen hand.

Techniques for Descriptive Writing

• Avoid excessive, flat or boring description.

Cool water flows through the rocky banks of the creek and into a wide pond. Reeds and cattails surrounding the bank embrace the pond like a mother’s enfolding arms reaching out to caress her sleeping child. Like a beaming proud mother’s eye, the sun drenches the scene with its loving warmth. Just beneath the sparkling surface of the water, minnows shoot from rock to rock like silver darts thrust like scattershot by some unseen hand.

Techniques for Descriptive Writing

• Avoid excessive, flat or boring description.

Cool water flows through the rocky banks of the creek and into a wide pond. Reeds and cattails surround the bank. The sun drenches the scene with its warmth. Just beneath the sparkling surface of the water, minnows shoot from rock to rock.

Techniques for Descriptive Writing

• Describing all your nouns with extra adjectives actually weakens the description.

• What strengthens description a great deal is to use a few but carefully chosen and vivid similes and metaphors e.g. 'He looked like a man just back from a journey to Hell'; 'Her cheeks were glowing like the ripest of ripe strawberries!'

• Help your reader feel as if he or she were actually there, experiencing the thing being described.

Techniques for Descriptive Writing

• It's important to use your description to create, develop or assist a mood suited to your subject matter or theme.

• Good descriptive writing depends on choosing exactly the right word to communicate what is in your mind. Consider the following sentences.• The teacher came into the classroom and sat on his chair behindthe desk.• The teacher drifted into the classroom and slumped into his chairbehind the desk.• The teacher stormed into the classroom and positioned himself onthe chair behind his desk.

Techniques for Descriptive Writing

Describe the following images

Things to remember about Descriptive Writing

• Be specific, not vague.• Elaborate (add more details and expand your

ideas)• Use vivid vocabulary• Include details that relate to your five senses.• Wherever possible, show, don't tell!

Thank You for your patience.