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Descriptive Essay Writing Guide

This document provides instructions and guidance for writing a descriptive essay. It discusses including sensory details about sight, sound, touch, taste, and smell. It emphasizes using concrete and specific details, showing rather than telling, and describing spatially from one location to another. It also covers using figurative language like metaphor, simile, hyperbole and personification. The document explains objective versus subjective description and provides an example of analyzing the mood of a painting through descriptive writing. Students are guided through planning, listing details, and drafting a paragraph analyzing the mood of Rousseau's painting "The Sleeping Gypsy".

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16 views26 pages

Descriptive Essay Writing Guide

This document provides instructions and guidance for writing a descriptive essay. It discusses including sensory details about sight, sound, touch, taste, and smell. It emphasizes using concrete and specific details, showing rather than telling, and describing spatially from one location to another. It also covers using figurative language like metaphor, simile, hyperbole and personification. The document explains objective versus subjective description and provides an example of analyzing the mood of a painting through descriptive writing. Students are guided through planning, listing details, and drafting a paragraph analyzing the mood of Rousseau's painting "The Sleeping Gypsy".

Uploaded by

pizzaguyme
Copyright
© Attribution Non-Commercial (BY-NC)
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as PPTX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd

Lesson 8

Descriptive Essay Introduction


Writer’s Prompt:
• Describe a room in your home in
explicit detail
– Bedroom
– Bathroom
– Living room
– kitchen
–
–
–
–
Assignment
• Read in Great Writing “Wuthering
Heights” on page 31.
• Answer questions:
– Meaning and Idea
• #3
– Language, Form, Structure
• #2
Assignment Review

• Virginia Woolf 1882-1941


• Virginia Woolf was an English writer, author and
novelist and a pioneer of modernism in English
literature.
• Among her most famous work are novels To the
Lighthouse, Mrs. Dalloway and Orlando and an
essay A Room of One's Own.
• She was an important figure in the Victorian
literary society and is regarded as one of the
greatest modernist literary personality of the
twentieth century.
• She became the innovator of the English
literature with her experiment with the 'stream
of consciousness' and broke the mold with her
highly experimental language denouncing the
Question #2/Meaning and
Idea
• On what details about the moth’s
struggle with death does Woolf
focus? What characteristics do they
come to represent for her?
• S h e fo cu se s o n th e in te n sity o f its
stru g g le s to clin g to life . S h e se e s it’ s la st
g a sp in w h ich th e m o th g e ts b a ck o n it’ s
fe e t. O n ce d e a d , W o o lf se e s th e m o th ’ s
d ig n ifie d a cce p ta n ce o f it’ s fa te , d e a th .
S im p ly p u t: life a n d th e stru g g le to e sca p e
d e a th .
The Descriptive Essay
What really happens in
our brains when we read
descriptive essays...or
anything at all?

SightSoundTouch
Sound Taste
Smell
Writing the Descriptive
Essay
 Description is used to make the reader
feel, to see, to hear, to taste, to smell what
the writer is describing.
• Imagery and the Senses:
– Sight
– Sound
– Touch
– Taste
– Smell

Concrete Details
• Make descriptions clear and easy to see in
the imagination.
• Include only indispensable detail
• Make objects clear, sharp, and alive.
• Figurative devices: Comparisons such as
similes, metaphors, personification.
• Set a scene
• Provide insight
•
Showing versus Telling
• Showing means drawing pictures,
• Telling means offering judgments.
• Sell the “sizzle” not the steak
• Showing is descriptive telling is
informative
•
•
Objective Description
• Objective descriptions are technical; the
details the writer uses are impersonal, at
a distance, independent of the
perceiving mind. Scientific writing relies
on objective description.
•
Subjective Description

• Subjective description allows your


personal attitudes and impressions to
guide your selection of words to shape
your construction of images.
• You want people to know how you felt
about the scene.
•
Spatial Description
• When describing something (usually
a place – but does not have to be)
you start at a certain spot and work
your way around the room or place
from location to location or spatially
• In my bathroom the sink is on the left
and the tub is on the right…

Figurative Language
• Metaphor
– Winter is a bear
• Simile
– Winter is like a bear
• Hyperbole
– Take the plank out of your own eye
first.
• Personification
– The cloud rolled by thinking happy
thoughts.
HENRI ROUSSEAU’S SLEEPING GYPSY
Descriptive Practice

As you look at his striking image by


the French primitive painter, Henri


Rousseau (1844-1910), what is your
first impression about the mood or
feeling the painting conveys?
PLANNING AND SHAPING

• Study the painting carefully.


• Quickly jot down a list of details from the
painting together with ideas about how
those details are related.
• Include the lighting, colors, shapes, lines,
and textures.
• Re-read your list.
• Write a sentence that describes the mood
this painting conveys.
DRAFTING

• Write a paragraph in response to


the question: “What mood does
Rousseau’s Sleeping Gypsy
convey?”
• Be sure to include the details of the
painting that contributed to your
impression.
Five Minute
Descriptive Freewriting
David Sedaris

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