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Description
Description can be defined as the expression, in vivid language, of what the five senses experience. A richly rendered description freezes a subject in time, evoking sights, smells, sounds, textures, and tastes in such a way that readers becomes one with the writer's world.
While your purpose and audience decide how much to describe, you have great freedom deciding what to descibe. Description is especially suited to objects, but you can also describe a person, an animal, a place, a time and a phenomenon or concept.
- Objective Description
- Subjective Description
Strategies for using description in an essay:
- 1. Focus a descriptive essay around a dominant impression
- 2. Select the details to include
- 3. Organize the descriptive details
- 4. Use vivid sensory language and varied sentence structure
Sample Writing 1: Meredith Hall:"Killing Chickens"
I tucked her wings tight against her heaving body, crouched over her, and covered her flailing head with my gloved hand. Holding her neck hard against
the floor of the coop, I took a breath, set something deep and hard inside my heart, and twisted her head. I heard her neck break with a crackle. Still
she fought me, struggling to be free of my weight, my gloved hands, my need to kill her. Her shiny black beak opened and closed, opened and closed
silently, as she gasped for air. I didn't know this would happen. I was undone by the flapping, the dust rising and choking me, the disbelieving little
eye turned up to mine. I held her beak closed, covering that eye. Still she pushed, her reptile legs bracing against mine, her warmth, her heart beating
fast with mine. I turned her head on her floppy neck again, and again, corkscrewing her breathing tube, struggling to end the gasping. The eye, turned
around and around, blinked and studied me. The early spring sun flowed onto us through a silver stream of dust, like a stage light, while we fought each
other. I lifted my head and saw that the other birds were eating still, pecking their way around us for stray bits of corn. This one, this twisted and
broken lump of gleaming black feathers, clawed hard at the floor, like a big stretch, and then deflated like a pierced ball. I waited, holding her tiny
beak and broken neck with all my might.
I was killing chickens. It was my 38th birthday. My brother had chosen that morning to tell me that he had caught his wife --- my best friend, Ashley --- in bed with
my husband a year before. I had absorbed the rumors and suspicions about other women for 10 years, but this one, I knew, was going to break us. When I roared
upstairs and confronted John, he told me to go fuck myself, ran downstairs and jumped int othe truck. Our sons, Sam and Ben, were making a surprise for me at the
table; they stood behind me silently in the kitchen door while John gunned the truck out of the yard. "It's okay, guys,"I said. "Mum and Dad just had
a fight. You better go finish my surprise before I come peeking."
Sample Writing 2: Maya Angelou:"Sister Flowers"(Longman, p167-173)
Narration
Narration means telling a single story or several related stories. Every public speaker, from politican to classroom teacher, knows that stories caper the
attention of listeners as nothing else can. We want to know what happened to others, not simply because we're curious, but also because their experiences
shed light on our own lives.
Strategies for using narration in an essay:
- 1. Identify the point of the narrative conflict
- 2. Develop only those details that advance the narrative point
- 3. Organize the narrative sequence: Flashback or flashforward
- 4. Make the narrative easy to follow
- 4. Make the narrative vigorous and immediate (Textbook pp72-73 & pp127-128)
Sample Writing:
1. Sarah Vowell: "Shooting Dad"
2. Student's Writing "If Only" (Textbook, pp203-204)
Illustration
Division-Classification
Process Analysis
Comparison-Contrast
Cause-Effect
Definition
Argumentation-Persuasion
