descriptive essay

DESCRIPTIVE ESSAY GUIDELINES THE DESCRIPTIVE ESSAY is simply creating a “picture with words.” Take a noun (person, place, thing, idea, or emotion) and fully describe using visuals greatly enhanced with adjectives. A thesaurus will be very helpful in writing this essay. Unlike the Narrative, the Descriptive does NOT need the story element of a beginning, middle, and end. For example, “The pen is blue with a plastic top” could be better described as, “The 4.6 and a half, greatly used plastic ball point pen, was halfway full of blue ink. It’s top was bent and the small piece that hooks onto the paper was chewed off with small pieces of blue plastic hanging on.” TOPICS for essay is YOUR CHOICE. SEE SYLLABUS FOR TECHNICAL GUIDELINES; word length, format, etc… Here are some more excerpts from descriptive writing: “He was a short, wiry, but muscular little guy with dark curly hair and a tough-looking face. He seemed to talk with some older forms of English elocution, syntax, and conjugation that had been preserved uphollow in the Appalachians.” -from “The Right Stuff” by Tom Wolfe “My house was on the side of a hill, immediately on the edge of the larger wood, in the midst of a young forest of pitch pines and hickories, and half a dozen rods from the pond, to which a narrow footpath led down the hill. In my front yard grew the strawberry, blackberry, and life-everlasting, johnswort and golden-rod, shrub-oaks and sand-cherry, blueberry and ground-nut…As I sit at my window this summer afternoon, hawks are circling about my clearing: the tantivy of wild pigeons, flying by twos and threes athwart my view, or perching restless on the white-pine boughs behind my house, give a voice to the air…” -from “Walden” by Henry David Thoreau