Descriptive Essays

Descriptive essays are usually fun to write, as students get the opportunity to “describe” things in their own terms and how they understand them. The problem starts when students start describing a particular term unknowingly deviate and start describing things which were not the core descriptive element. Descriptive essay writing is all about focus, consistency and research.

What to Describe?

First things first, you need to know what you are going to describe. It is important that you have a clear vision of what exactly are you going to describe. Descriptive essays are usually limited to scope of description at academic level, but there can be other things you can o want to describe depending on your assignment or homework. These include, but not limited to:

• an individual/ personality
• an event
• a landmark or place
• personal experience
• an object etc.
  

Eventually, anything that you can understand or describe clearly could be the topic of your descriptive essay.

Why do we write descriptive essay?

Descriptive essays are a great way of getting your creative writing juices flowing. Descriptive essay writing is simply an academic writing exercise that allows you to describe anything you feel comfortable and clearly. If you notice, we have been consistently using the work “clearly”, so we can tell students that clarity of thoughts is important and if your ideas, experience, language, etc are not clear, you will not be able to describe things accurately and chances to deviate from the original topic become higher.

Descriptive essay writing is usually used to evaluate the students creative writing potential since a descriptive essay is all about self expression and perception and putting down what you see, feel, taste, smell or experience emotionally on paper.

Example: Let’s assume you were to write about your 5th grade teacher, how she taught. You could begin with the subjects she taught and how she taught, but descriptive essays are general in topics, but require specialized answer from students. You can write about her strictness with regard to the subjects taught and her kindness when it came to solving student problems. You can start with how she taught followed by her specialties and later how she supported the academics and personal matters.

How to write a descriptive essay?

One important thing about descriptive writing is that you need to show the reader what you see, and not just tell. There is a big difference between show and tell.
Let’s consider the following examples to explain the difference between showing and telling.

• I was standing at the beach looking at the waves, amazed.
• As I stood on the soft sands of the beach, I could see the waves fighting to reach the shore, how beautiful it looked, wave upon wave, splash after splash but with every wave that touched my feet, I could feel the how cold and dangerous the ocean could be, a master of disguise.

The first example tells readers that you were at the beach looking at the waves. The second example shows readers that you were looking at the waves. To be able to write an effective descriptive essay, you should show the reader to be able to see, hear, taste, smell and touch the world around you on paper.
As mentioned earlier, when writing a descriptive essay, students must consider the use of the following senses when composing the essay, as it is the reader who will need to experience what you have experienced,

• sight
• smell
• sound
• touch
• taste

When students focus the descriptive writing on the senses, students are able to provide dramatic and specific details that actually show their readers rather than tell them what students are describing.

Quick Tips for Writing Your Descriptive Essay:

Writing a descriptive essay can be a rich and rewarding experience, but it can also feel a bit complicated. It's helpful, therefore, to keep a quick checklist of the essential questions to keep in mind as you plan, draft, and revise your essay.