Describe and literacy Essays

Reading: Steinbeck Model for describing a person

This is a model piece of writing for your descriptive writing assignment.

Read the following passage, very, very carefully!

At daybreak Billy Buck emerged from the bunkhouse and stood for a moment on the porch looking up at the sky. He was a broad, bandy-legged little man with a walrus mustache, with square hands, puffed and muscled on the palms. His eyes were a contemplative, watery grey and the hair which protruded from under his Stetson hat was spiky and weathered. Billy was still stuffing his shirt into his blue jeans as he stood on the porch. He unbuckled his belt and tightened it again. The belt showed, by the worn shiny places opposite each hole, the gradual increase in Billy's middle over a period of years. When he had seen to the weather, Billy cleared each nostril by holding its mate closed with his forefinger and blowing fiercely. Then he walked down to the barn, rubbing his hands together. He curried and brushed two saddle horses in the stalls, talking quietly to them all the time; and he had hardly finished when the iron triangle started ringing at the ranch house. Billy stuck the brush and currycomb together and laid them on the rail, and went up to breakfast. His action had been so deliberate and yet so wasteless of time that he came to the house while Mrs. Tiflin was still ringing the triangle. She nodded her grey head to him and withdrew into the kitchen. Billy Buck sat down on the steps, because he was a cow-hand, and it wouldn't be fitting that he should go first into the dining room. He heard Mr. Tiflin in the house, stamping his feet into his boots.

(270 words) From The Red Pony by John Steinbeck (a great novel, by the way, and one I would highly recommend)

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Examine every word of this description. Steinbeck is a another masterful writer and his 270 words are filled with not only Billy's physical description but also his personality, philosophy, occupation, rank in society, attitudes to life and work, competence at his job, among other things. If you try, you can list at least 35 separate aspects that relate to Billy Buck.