Sample Descriptions

A good descriptive paragraph is like a window into another world.

Through the use of careful examples or details, an author can conjure
a scene that vividly describes a person, place, or thing. The best
descriptive writing appeals to multiple senses at once—smell, sight,
taste, touch, and hearing—and is found in both fiction and nonfiction.

In their own way, each of the following writers (three of them

students, two of them professional authors) have selected a belonging
or a place that holds special meaning to them. After identifying that
subject in a clear topic sentence, they proceed to describe it in detail
while explaining its personal significance.

A description is a set of characteristics by which someone or

something can be recognised. We can

describe people, places and events. By describing them we make a

sketch in words so that the

reader is able to get a clear picture of the described object. A good

description creates a clear

mental image in the mind of the reader.Youneed to use sensory

information to enable readers to

use their five senses of touch, taste, smell, hearing, and sight to
understand the topic of the essay.

Qualities of a Descriptive Essay

• Clear and Concise

• Use of Images

• Use of Five Senses

• It must not include opinions or speculations.

As far as clear and concise language is concerned, it is necessary to

describe things precisely.
Imagery is used to make things seem real and remarkable. The use of
the five senses creates the

imagery or a mental picture, for each reader.

Format

Heading (Topic)

• Topic sentence: The first sentence that introduces the main idea of
the paragraph

• Supporting details: They come after the topic sentence, making up

the body of the

description. They give details to develop and support the main idea.

• Closing sentence: This is the last sentence. It restates the main idea
and sums up the

thoughts using different words

Examples of Descriptive Writing

The following sentences provide examples of the concreteness,
evocativeness and plausibility of good descriptive writing.

● Her last smile to me wasn’t a sunset. It was an eclipse, the last eclipse,
noon dying away to darkness where there would be no dawn.
● My Uber driver looked like a deflating airbag and sounded like talk
radio on repeat.
● The old man was bent into a capital C, his head leaning so far forward
that his beard nearly touched his knobby knees.
● The painting was a field of flowers, blues and yellows atop deep green
stems that seemed to call the viewer in to play.
● My dog’s fur felt like silk against my skin and her black coloring shone,
absorbing the sunlight and reflecting it back like a pure, dark mirror.
● The sunset filled the sky with a deep red flame, setting the clouds
ablaze.
● The waves rolled along the shore in a graceful, gentle rhythm, as if
dancing with the land.
● Winter hit like a welterweight that year, a jabbing cold you thought you
could stand until the wind rose up and dropped you to the canvas.
"A Friendly Clown"
"On one corner of my dresser sits a smiling toy clown on a tiny unicycle―a
gift I received last Christmas from a close friend. The clown's short yellow
hair, made of yarn, covers its ears but is parted above the eyes. The blue
eyes are outlined in black with thin, dark lashes flowing from the brows. It
has cherry-red cheeks, nose, and lips, and its broad grin disappears into the
wide, white ruffle around its neck. The clown wears a fluffy, two-tone nylon
costume. The left side of the outfit is light blue, and the right side is red.
The two colors merge in a dark line that runs down the center of the small
outfit. Surrounding its ankles and disguising its long black shoes are big
pink bows. The white spokes on the wheels of the unicycle gather in the
center and expand to the black tire so that the wheel somewhat resembles
the inner half of a grapefruit. The clown and unicycle together stand about
a foot high. As a cherished gift from my good friend Tran, this colorful
figure greets me with a smile every time I enter my room."

Observe how the writer moves clearly from a description of the head
of the clown to the body to the unicycle underneath. More than
sensory details for the eyes, she provides touch, in the description
that the hair is made of yarn and the suit of nylon. Certain colors are
specific, as in cherry-red cheeks and light blue, and descriptions help
the reader to visualize the object: the parted hair, the color line on the
suit, and the grapefruit analogy. Dimensions overall help to provide
the reader with the item's scale, and the descriptions of the size of the
ruffle and bows on the shoes in comparison to what's nearby provide
telling detail. The concluding sentence helps to tie the paragraph
together by emphasizing the personal value of this gift.

"The Blond Guitar"

by Jeremy Burden

"My most valuable possession is an old, slightly warped blond guitar―the

first instrument I taught myself how to play. It's nothing fancy, just a
Madeira folk guitar, all scuffed and scratched and fingerprinted. At the top
is a bramble of copper-wound strings, each one hooked through the eye of a
silver tuning key. The strings are stretched down a long, slim neck, its frets
tarnished, the wood worn by years of fingers pressing chords and picking
notes. The body of the Madeira is shaped like an enormous yellow pear, one
that was slightly damaged in shipping. The blond wood has been chipped
and gouged to gray, particularly where the pick guard fell off years ago. No,
it's not a beautiful instrument, but it still lets me make music, and for that I
will always treasure it."

Here, the writer uses a topic sentence to open his paragraph

then uses the following sentences to add specific details. The author
creates an image for the mind's eye to travel across by describing the
parts of the guitar in a logical fashion, from the strings on the head to
the worn wood on the body.

He emphasizes its condition by the number of different descriptions of

the wear on the guitar, such as noting its slight warp; distinguishing
between scuffs and scratches; describing the effect that fingers have
had on the instrument by wearing down its neck, tarnishing frets, and
leaving prints on the body; listing both its chips and gouges and even
noting their effects on the color of the instrument. The author even
describes the remnants of missing pieces. After all that, he plainly
states his affection for it.

"Gregory"
by Barbara Carter

"Gregory is my beautiful gray Persian cat. He walks with pride and grace,
performing a dance of disdain as he slowly lifts and lowers each paw with
the delicacy of a ballet dancer. His pride, however, does not extend to his
appearance, for he spends most of his time indoors watching television and
growing fat. He enjoys TV commercials, especially those for Meow Mix and
9 Lives. His familiarity with cat food commercials has led him to reject
generic brands of cat food in favor of only the most expensive brands.
Gregory is as finicky about visitors as he is about what he eats, befriending
some and repelling others. He may snuggle up against your ankle, begging
to be petted, or he may imitate a skunk and stain your favorite trousers.
Gregory does not do this to establish his territory, as many cat experts
think, but to humiliate me because he is jealous of my friends. After my
guests have fled, I look at the old fleabag snoozing and smiling to himself in
front of the television set, and I have to forgive him for his obnoxious, but
endearing, habits."
The writer here focuses less on the physical appearance of her pet
than on the cat's habits and actions. Notice how many different
descriptors go into just the sentence about how the cat walks:
emotions of pride and disdain and the extended metaphor of the
dancer, including the phrases the "dance of disdain," "grace," and
"ballet dancer." When you want to portray something through the use
of a metaphor, make sure you are consistent, that all the descriptors
make sense with that one metaphor. Don't use two different
metaphors to describe the same thing, because that makes the image
you're trying to portray awkward and convoluted. The consistency
adds emphasis and depth to the description.

Personification is an effective literary device for giving lifelike detail

to an inanimate object or an animal, and Carter uses it to great effect.
Look at how much time she spends on the discussions of what the cat
takes pride in (or doesn't) and how it comes across in his attitude,
with being finicky and jealous, acting to humiliate by spraying, and
just overall behaving obnoxiously. Still, she conveys her clear
affection for the cat, something to which many readers can relate.

"The Magic Metal Tube"

by Maxine Hong Kingston

"Once in a long while, four times so far for me, my mother brings out the
metal tube that holds her medical diploma. On the tube are gold circles
crossed with seven red lines each―"joy" ideographs in abstract. There are
also little flowers that look like gears for a gold machine. According to the
scraps of labels with Chinese and American addresses, stamps, and
postmarks, the family airmailed the can from Hong Kong in 1950. It got
crushed in the middle, and whoever tried to peel the labels off stopped
because the red and gold paint came off too, leaving silver scratches that
rust. Somebody tried to pry the end off before discovering that the tube falls
apart. When I open it, the smell of China flies out, a thousand-year-old bat
flying heavy-headed out of the Chinese caverns where bats are as white as
dust, a smell that comes from long ago, far back in the brain."

This paragraph opens the third chapter of Maxine Hong Kingston's

"The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts," a lyrical
account of a Chinese-American girl growing up in California. Notice
how Kingston integrates informative and descriptive details in this
account of "the metal tube" that holds her mother's diploma from
medical school. She uses color, shape, texture (rust, missing paint,
pry marks, and scratches), and smell, where she has a particularly
strong metaphor that surprises the reader with its distinctness. The
last sentence in the paragraph (not reproduced here) is more about
the smell; closing the paragraph with this aspect adds emphasis to it.
The order of the description is also logical, as the first response to the
closed object is how it looks rather than how it smells when opened.

"Inside District School #7, Niagara County, New York"

by Joyce Carol Oates

"Inside, the school smelled smartly of varnish and wood smoke from the
potbellied stove. On gloomy days, not unknown in upstate New York in this
region south of Lake Ontario and east of Lake Erie, the windows emitted a
vague, gauzy light, not much reinforced by ceiling lights. We squinted at the
blackboard, that seemed far away since it was on a small platform, where
Mrs. Dietz's desk was also positioned, at the front, left of the room. We sat
in rows of seats, smallest at the front, largest at the rear, attached at their
bases by metal runners, like a toboggan; the wood of these desks seemed
beautiful to me, smooth and of the red-burnished hue of horse chestnuts.
The floor was bare wooden planks. An American flag hung limply at the far
left of the blackboard and above the blackboard, running across the front of
the room, designed to draw our eyes to it avidly, worshipfully, were paper
squares showing that beautifully shaped script known as Parker
Penmanship."

In this paragraph (originally published in "Washington Post Book

World" and reprinted in "Faith of a Writer: Life, Craft, Art"), Joyce
Carol Oates affectionately describes the one-room schoolhouse she
attended from first through fifth grades. Notice how she appeals to
our sense of smell before moving on to describe the layout and
contents of the room. When you walk into a place, its overall smell
hits you immediately, if it's pungent, even before you've taken in the
whole area with your eyes. Thus this choice of chronology for this
descriptive paragraph is also a logical order of narration, even though
it differs from the Hong Kingston paragraph. It allows the reader to
imagine the room just as if he were walking into it.

The positioning of items in relation to other items is on full display in

this paragraph, to give people a clear vision of the layout of the place
as a whole. For the objects inside, she uses many descriptors of what
materials they are made from. Note the imagery portrayed by the use
of the phrases "gauzy light," "toboggan," and "horse chestnuts." You
can imagine the emphasis placed on penmanship study by the
description of their quantity, the deliberate location of the paper
squares, and the desired effect upon the students brought about by
this location.

Sources
● Kingston, Maxine Hong. The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among
Ghosts. Vintage, 1989.
● Oates, Joyce Carol. The Faith of a Writer: Life, Craft, Art. HarperCollins
e-books, 2009.

Here are a few tips to hone your writing skills and get the descriptive language just right:

Use descriptive phrases/Vocabulary ....

Remember sensory details. ...

Make use of figurative language. ...

He was a rich man: banker, merchant, manufacturer, and what not. A big, loud man, with

a stare, and a metallic laugh. A man made out of a coarse material, which seemed to have

been stretched to make so much of him. A man with a great puffed head and forehead,

swelled veins in his temples, and such a strained skin to his face that it seemed to hold his

eyes open, and lift his eyebrows up. A man with a pervading appearance on him of being

infl ated like a balloon, and ready to start. A man who could never suffi ciently vaunt himself a

self-made man. A man who was always proclaiming, through that brassy speaking-trumpet

of a voice of his, his old ignorance and his old poverty. A man who was the Bully of humility.

A year or two younger than his eminently practical friend, Mr Bounderby looked older;

his seven or eight and forty might have had the seven or eight added to it again, without

surprising anybody. He had not much hair. One might have fancied he had talked it off; and

that what was left, all standing up in disorder, was in that condition from being constantly

blown about by his windy boastfulness.

In the formal drawing-room of Stone Lodge, standing on the

hearthrug, warming himself before the fi re, Mr Bounderby

delivered some observations to Mrs Gradgrind on the

circumstance of its being his birthday. He stood before the

fi re, partly because it was a cool spring afternoon, though

the sun shone; partly because the shade of Stone Lodge was

always haunted by the ghost of damp mortar; partly because

he thus took up a commanding position, from which to

subdue Mrs Gradgrind.

‘I hadn’t a shoe to my foot. As to a stocking, I didn’t know

such a thing by name. I passed the day in a ditch, and the

night in a pigsty. That’s the way I spent my tenth birthday.

Not that a ditch was new to me, for I was born in a ditch.’

Charles Dickens