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WS Descriptive Writing

This document provides guidance on writing descriptive compositions. It emphasizes selecting relevant details and avoiding cliches. Descriptive writing requires sustaining focus on a single topic using vivid yet appropriate language. Examples are provided of passages that use unusual word combinations, forceful verbs, and new connections to enhance descriptions. Students are asked to analyze the examples and provide their own descriptive paragraph.

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SujayJain
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288 views

WS Descriptive Writing

This document provides guidance on writing descriptive compositions. It emphasizes selecting relevant details and avoiding cliches. Descriptive writing requires sustaining focus on a single topic using vivid yet appropriate language. Examples are provided of passages that use unusual word combinations, forceful verbs, and new connections to enhance descriptions. Students are asked to analyze the examples and provide their own descriptive paragraph.

Uploaded by

SujayJain
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
Available Formats
Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Worksheet

AOs: R1 - R4,W1, W3, W4


The descriptive composition

This type of writing is exacting to sustain on a single topic. You should be


confident in your skill to keep it up for the required length and your descriptions
should be of an acceptable standard i.e. free from clichs and hackneyed
expressions.
The following hints and skills should be well established with you as a writer
before you attempt this kind of writing in an examination:
Select details carefully, in other words select those that are relevant
to the theme, or to the point that you wish to make. Avoid a
monotonous list of what is already known.
Do not choose a theme if you do not know enough about it. It is
difficult enough to describe something that you do know, so avoid the
unknown at all cost.
Use words out of their expected context. However, take care that
they still make sense within the new one. Do not move from the
sublime to the ridiculous. The phrase .. after hissing tramsis used
effectively in Extract b below..
Use connections between matters that are new, but that will still be
obvious to the reader. This technique is often used to create a comic
effect: Her false teeth were large and bluish white, and when she
opened her mouth the effect was like that of the sudden self-opening
of a piano lid(Example a, below)
Use verbs that are forcefully descriptive. Look at the example under d
below. Words such as snaked, galumphed, tossed and curled are
very effective within the context. They stress the contrast between
the Beauty who lives in the house with his owner, and the one who
goes prowling on his own at night.
Examples of effective descriptions
a. Her face, like so many faces I was now encountering, consisted chiefly
of flexible furniture of the expression of public emotions, or a reverent
self arrangement of the draperies of old yellow soul-skin. When she
suddenly lifted these draperies round her mouth, I was frightened, unless
I saw that she had determined upon a smile which she would then
execute ruthlessly. Her false teeth were large and bluish white, and
when she opened her mouth the effect was like that of the sudden self-
opening of a piano lid, for a moment. She was tall, straight and thin,
dressed in grey and mauve woollens with a long string of tooth-like
beads round her functional neck; her head being capped with a dusty hat
of grey hair.
From: Miss Bancroft, by Philip OConnor

b. It was six oclock on a winters evening. Thin, dingy rain spat and
drizzled past the lighted street-lamps. The pavements shone long and
yellow. In squawking goloshes, with macintosh collars up and bowlers
and trilbies weeping, youngish men from the offices bundled home
WS Descriptive Writing Page 1
A Kellerman
Village Montessori School
against the thistly wind and older men, clinging on to the big, black circular
birds of their umbrellas, were wafted back, up the gaslit hills, to safe, hot
slippered, weather-proof hearths, and wives called Mother, and old, fond
fleabag dogs, and the wireless babbling.
Young women from the offices, who smelt of scent and powder and wet pixie
hoods and hair, scuttled, giggling, arm-in-arm, after hissing trams, and
screeched as they splashed their stockings in the puddles rainbowed with oil
between the slippery lines From: The followers, by Dylan Thomas

The following is a description of a burning building and of the wall that was busy
falling onto the narrator.

c. The top four storeys were fiercely alight. The rooms inside were alive
with red fire. The black outside walls remained untouched. And thus,
like the lighted carriage of a night express, there appeared alternating
rectangles of black and red that emphasized vividly the extreme
symmetry of the window spacing: each oblong window shape posed as
a vermilion panel set in perfect order upon the dark face of the wallIn
rigid rows of ten, one row place precisely above the other, with strong
contrasts of black and red, the blazing windows stood to attention in
strict formation. The oblong building, the oblong windows, the oblong
spacing. Orange-red colour seemed to bulge from the black framework,
assumed tactile values, like boiling jelly that expanded inside a thick
black squared grill.

From: The Wall, by William Sansom

This description of Beauty, a pampered dog, shows two contrasting natures;


when the dog is at home, and when it roams the town on its own. Note how the
two kinds of behaviour is described.

d. I hadnt noticed Beauty until then because he was so well-behaved. He


lay flat on the window-sill as inert as a cream bun on a counter. I think
he was the most perfect Pekinese I have ever seen - although I cant
pretendHe would have been as white as milk if a little coffee had not
been added, but that was hardly an imperfection - it enhanced his
beauty. His eyes from where I sat seemed deep black, like the centre of
a flower, and they were completely undisturbed by thought. This was
not a dog to respond to the word rat or to show a youthful enthusiasm if
someone suggested a walk. Nothing less than his own image in a glass
would rouse him, I imagined, to a flicker of interest

A patch of white, which I first took to be a cat, moved stealthily along the
house-fronts ahead of me, snaked behind a dustbin. a pattern of light
through the slats of a shutter striped the road in yellow tigerish bars and
presently Beauty slid out again and looked at me with his pansy face and
black expressionless eyes
WS Descriptive Writing Page 2
A Kellerman
Village Montessori School
a long tube of intestine belonging to God knows what animal; he tossed it in
the air, so that it curled round the milk-white throat. Then he abandoned the
dustbin, and he galumphed down the street like a harlequin, trailing behind
him the intestine which might have been a string of sausages.

From: Beauty, by Graham Greene

Assignment

The following table is based on the above examples. Reread all of them in order to
complete the table, and then enter short quotations from the given passages. In
certain instances, cells in the table will remain blank, because a feature is not
present in the text. You may want to have some group discussions before you start.

Example Details Words out of New Forcefully


relevant to expected connections descriptive
theme context verbs
a

Write down a description of one of the following:

a) A beloved place of quiet


b) A popular holiday resort
c) A famous museum
d) The experience of ziplining
e) The first time you did a bungee jump

For any of these descriptions, do NOT relate a back story about how it came about
that you are now in this place that you wish to describe. Your first sentence should
already be descriptive.

Sources consulted
Welsh, Anne: You can write better essays, 1982, Maskew Miller Ltd, Cape Town
WS Descriptive Writing Page 3
A Kellerman
Village Montessori School

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