Creative writing - Mike Sanders 2014
Descriptive essays
The masterful essay
Short-form genres
The goal of descriptive writing is for readers to see, hear, smell, taste, or feel (see the importance of those again?) your topic as if it’s right in front of them. Descriptive writing has a point, although it isn’t always directly stated—in which case it’s conveying a dominant impression.
Writing a descriptive essay often involves both objective and subjective elements. Objective elements are the plain facts. For example, let’s say the temperature is 97 degrees Fahrenheit. In objective description, you would simply state the temperature. But in subjective description, you might refer to the temperature as “stuffy” or “sweltering.” That’s your assessment of the temperature; another person might disagree. Thus, which details you choose about a topic and the language you use to convey them create the dominant impression.
DEFINITION
A descriptive essay is a piece of writing used to explain something in detail, usually employing the five senses.
How much detail is needed depends on your audience, what you’re describing, and the goal of your description. Almost everyone has experienced 97 degrees, so describing it would require just enough details to create the dominant impression. Readers would fill in the rest from their own experience with heat.
On the other hand, almost no one has been on the moon. So if you wanted to describe the lunar landscape, you would have to go into specific detail about what you’d see and how sounds are exceedingly rare. How would it feel to move in that kind of gravity? Readers would need you to try to give them every detail of the scene because they—and probably you as well—have no experience to draw from. In addition, the more you want readers to focus on something, the more description you should give it. This technique lets you control what your readers dwell on and what they pass over quickly.
With these variables in mind, here are the steps to successful descriptive writing:
1. Gather specific details on your topic.
2. Use the most vivid language you can to describe the topic.
3. Decide what dominant impression you want to convey.
4. Present details in spatial order to make your description flow.
It’s important to select a natural starting point based on your topic. When describing a person, you might start with their face. With a house, you would start at the front door. In describing a whole scene, it’s usually best to work from big to small. Describe the trees in the forest before the insects, for example. Use transition words to move from one detail to the next.
Ideally, your goal is to put your sensory experience into words so powerfully, your reader will feel like they’re right there. As much as possible, use concrete words that describe physical objects or sensations.
When you really can’t find a word to describe a sensory detail, or if you’ve run out of words, you can describe one thing by comparing it to another. You might write that the medicine tasted like shampoo, for example. Or the sweater was as soft as your cat’s fur.
To choose a dominant impression, ask yourself what you notice most about your subject. What makes this person, place, or object distinctive and unlike others? Focus your description around what stands out. Like expository essays, descriptive pieces can be very dry, so employ as much creativity as you can muster.
WATCH OUT!
Don’t confuse describing with making value judgments. Remember that the primary goal is to convey sensory information. You can’t describe a town, for example, just by saying it’s a nice place. You have to give physical details like the size of the town, its layout, the style of the buildings, and so forth. The best descriptive writing creates a clear image in the audience’s mind. Readers can then decide for themselves that it’s a nice town.