Lesson 8
Descriptive Essay Introduction
Descriptive
Writing Process Narrative Essay
Essay
Common
Exemplification
Personal Essay Writing
Essay
Mistakes
Writer’s Prompt:
• Describe a room in your home in explicit detail
– Bedroom
– Bathroom
– Living room
– kitchen
Assignment
• Read in Great Writing “The Kitchen” on page
45.
• Answer questions:
– Meaning and Idea
• #3
– Language, Form, Structure
• #2
• The Descriptive Essay
The Descriptive Essay
• Length: 1.5 to 2 pages
• Font: Arial
• Type Size: 11pt
• Double Spaced
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
traditional literary techniques.
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?
She focuses on the intensity of its struggles to cling
to life. She sees it’s last gasp in which the moth gets
back on it’s feet. Once dead, Woolf sees the moth’s
dignified acceptance of it’s fate, death. Simply put:
life and the struggle to escape death.
The Descriptive Essay
What really happens in
our brains when we read
descriptive essays...or
anything at all?
Sight Sound TouchTaste
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:
1) Sight
2) Sound
3) Touch
4) Taste
5) 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
– A steak is a piece of meat.
– The pungent aroma of grilled steak wafted
across the patio and the sight of it sitting there
on the grill, juicy and succulent, made my
mouth water with anticipation.
• Showing is descriptive telling is informative
Objective Description
• Objective descriptions are technical
• 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 Free writing
