DESCRIPTIVE WRITING

Pilar Aguado Jiménez

Lengua Inglesa IV
The descriptive essay is a genre of essay that
asks the student to describe an object, person,
place, experience, emotion, situation, etc. This
genre encourages the student’s ability to create
a written account of a particular experience.

What is more, this genre allows for a great deal

of artistic freedom (the goal of which is to paint
an image that is vivid and moving in the mind of
the reader).

guidelines for writing a descriptive essay:

•Take time to brainstorm

•Use clear and concise language.
•Choose vivid language.
•Use your senses!
•What were you thinking?!
•Leave the reader with a clear impression.
•Be organized!
 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?
WORD WEB
• Smells blend as you cook
• Can be smelled from far
away
• Smells drift from kitchen

crunch
salty spicy

smell
taste
fried
eating Fried Chicken
with
family
wash preparation
context chicken

outside dry fry

picnic

salt heat oil

afternoon

flour
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?
• What details should be left out?

Focus on the Five Senses

• Sight
• Sound: If you are
describing a
person, remember
to include
dialogue.
• Smell
• Touch
• Taste
 Adding details to sentences
Details tell what something looks like, or how
it sounds, feels, tastes, or smells. We can
use nouns, adjectives, adverbs, and verbs to
add details. The more specific the detailsare,
the more effective and interesting the writing
will be. Clear, specific details allow the reader
to create a picture in his or her mind of what
is being described. Compare the general
sentences below with ones that have specific
details.

General sentences Sentences with Specific Details

The crabs were good. The crabs were tender and sweet with a salty
taste.
He bought some fruit He bought some sweet, juicy strawberries.
She walked to the door She tiptoed to the door.
She walked to the door She walked quickly and silently to the door.
Similes
Descriptive writing may use similes to make
something seem more familiar or more
creative. Similes make ideas easier to
understand, and they can also express
feelings. Similes are often used in literature
and poetry. Look at the famous examples
below:

The sun was like a glowing ball of fire. -Shakespeare

My love is like red, red rose. -Robert Burns

I was young and easy… and happy as the grass was

green. -Dylan Thomas

Simile Structure
A simile can use the preposition like + noun
or noun phrase

The stars looked like diamonds

A simile can also use as … as + noun or

noun phrase. This kind of simile also uses an
adjective

He is as clever as a fox
 Concrete Details
She was nervous as She used the
she approached the sleeves of her stained
staircase. wool sweater to wipe
the sweat from her
forehead before
squinting into the
darkness that lay
before her. She
rubbed her moist
palms against her
jeans before shoving
her hand back into
her side pocket and
hastily pulling out her
flashlight.

Show: Don’t Tell

But what's the difference between showing and
telling? Consider these two simple examples:
• I grew tired after dinner.

• 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.
 Word Choice:

• The courthouse sagged

• A black dog suffered
• Men’s stiff collars wilted
Descriptive organization
In a descriptive essay, a writer uses details to tell
how a subject looks, sounds, smells, tastes, or
feels. The essay should make the reader feel like
responding to what he or she is reading.
Introduction
• The hook introduces the object or event of
description
• The middle sentences provide the background
• The thesis statement tells why the object or
event of description is important to the writer.
Body paragraphs
• Most of the description is in the body
paragraphs.
• Adjectives and adverbs make the experience
more vivid.
• The scene is often described with prepositions
and prepositional phrases that specify location
or position in space.
• Comparisons, such as similes, can make the
writing more descriptive, familiar, and
expressive.
Conclusion
The conclusion gives the writer’s final opinion
about the description.
 Tips for Organization

• Try moving your reader through space and time

chronologically.
• Use a then-and-now approach to show decay,
change, or improvement. The house where you
grew up might now be a rambling shack. The
variations on this strategy are endless.
• You may also use a topic-by-topic approach,
especially if you are describing a person.

Remember to come up
with a clear thesis
statement/focus.
However, this thesis
does not necessarily
have to come at the
beginning of the essay.

In this case, you may come to your overall

statement about the value of the object(s) in your
conclusion.
It is at least twenty years later and I can still remember
my first visit to Lou’s Café. Stopping in to see if anyone
could tell us where to locate the turn we had missed, my
husband and I received a large dose of culture shock. It
seemed as if we had opened the door to the decades: a
place where generations came and went, a place where
time stood still and passed by at the same time.
Miss Lou Dixon owns and runs that restaurant in the
middle of the town of Sunbright, Tennessee. Miss Lou
has been in business at that location since 1954. Even
though the place looks a little squalid, it is not for lack of
care; in fact, Lou is proud of how clean she keeps her
place. She has often been heard to say, with the
strongest East Tennessee accent, “It don’t matter how
pore a body is.They can be clean.” She is proud of her
“A” rating and prominently displays it.
It is not a fancy restaurant. The hundreds of booted
loggers, railroad workers, and oil field roughnecks
trekking through have worn the carpet thin. Chunks are
missing from the carpet at the favorite tables of the
workers. The hardened veneer on some of the tables is
missing a notch here and there. The paint on the walls
has cracks and there is a perennial smell of hamburgers
permeating the air. The casual observer could be forgiven
for thinking the place is about to fold financially; instead,
what we found that night was a well camouflaged center
of social activity and the finest, most accurate, information
available.
When entering the door at Lou’s, two things are
immediately noticeable: the place is rarely empty and
seems to consist of a maze of rooms. The first room,
through the door, is the main part of the restaurant.
There is another, rarely used, dining room off to the
right. It was added during the oil well boom of the
seventies. Through the main dining room is yet
another room; it guards the door leading into the
kitchen. This room contains the most coveted table in
the place. The highest tribute Lou can bestow on
anyone is to allow them access to seats at this table.
This table is the family table; it is reserved for Lou’s,
and her daughter Karen’s, immediate family and
treasured friends.
When entering the main dining room, whether by
design or by custom, there is a definite pecking order
involved in the seating arrangements. The first table
on the left, presided over by an elderly gentleman with
Basset Hound eyes, belongs to the old men of the
town. The table sits in front of one of two large
windows; the old men can see and are able to
comment on the “doins of them young ’uns running
the town these days.” It is amusing to discover that
the average age of the people under discussion is at
least fifty and they took over their businesses from the
same old men looking over them now.
On the right side, the other large window is
dominated by the “women’s information league.” In
other towns they would be known as busybodies or
gossips. At Lou’s, they are part of the complicated
information gathering process. They bring all the
information from the night before and are linked to the
rest of the town
 through the old fashioned rotary telephone hanging
outside Lou’s kitchen door. The phone rings constantly:
someone wants to call in an order, someone wants to
leave a message for a person the caller knows is going
to be there sometime during the day, and someone else
wants to know where the police and the ambulance
were going last night. Along with all the calls coming in
for the special of the day are also calls delivering the
latest events of the day. The old men on the other side
of the room will be giving a running commentary on the
family of the latest newsmaker, their history in the
community, arrest record if any; the who, what, when,
where, and why, of the story, with an accuracy to equal
any television or newspaper reporter.
In the evenings, when Lou’s daughter Karen gets in
from school, she brings a change of atmosphere. Even
though the news branch never stops, it is replaced in
importance by the young people, heralding the
evening. The old juke box, reigning in the corner, is
brought to life and starts blasting tunes that cover at
least twenty years of change in musical tastes. The
place fills up with the town’s young people. Whether the
kids are flirting, giggling, strutting around, being manly
for the girls, or hiding in the darkest corner to profess
undying love for each other, the restaurant begins its
shift as the town’s social center.
All of the activity at Miss Lou’s is conducted in a
haze of aromas, guaranteed to make the mouth
water. The smell is never the same; it depends entirely
on what is cooking at the time. Whether it is roast for
tomorrow’s
lunch special, a cake someone asked Lou to make, the
spices of an apple pie, or the ever present odor of
hamburgers, it is a well known fact, it will taste as good
as it smells. The best part of being at Lou’s is not her
food, however; it is the feeling of being part of her
extended family, being part of a tradition, when
traditions are hard to come by.
The last time I was in Lou’s, I experienced another
trip through time’s door; it was as if nothing had
changed, nothing, except the amount of gray in her
hair. Some of the old men had passed on; they have
since been replaced by two or three of the “young ‘uns”
they used to keep their eyes on. The phone still rings
constantly, the women still gather their news, and a new
bunch of kids take over at night. Everything is the
same, everything is different.
WRITING TASK 1
DESCRIPTIVE ESSAY
Write an essay where the description of one
the the main characters’ mood could be
used to support your thesis