Lesson 8 Descriptive Essay Introduction

Writing Process Descriptive Essay Narrative Essay

Exemplification Essay Personal Essay

Common Writing

Mistakes

Writer’s Prompt:

• Describe a room in your home in explicit detail– Bedroom– Bathroom– Living room– kitchen

Assignment

• Read in Great Writing “The Kitchen” on page 45.

• Answer questions:– Meaning and Idea

• #3

– Language, Form, Structure• #2

• The Descriptive Essay

The Descriptive Essay

• Length: 1.5 to 2 pages• Font: Arial• Type Size: 11pt• Double Spaced

Assignment Review

• Virginia Woolf 1882-1941• Virginia Woolf was an English writer, author and novelist and a

pioneer of modernism in English literature. • Among her most famous work are novels To the Lighthouse,

Mrs. Dalloway and Orlando and an essay A Room of One's Own. • She was an important figure in the Victorian literary society and

is regarded as one of the greatest modernist literary personality of the twentieth century.

• She became the innovator of the English literature with her experiment with the 'stream of consciousness' and broke the mold with her highly experimental language denouncing the traditional literary techniques.

Question #2/Meaning and Idea

• On what details about the moth’s struggle with death does Woolf focus? What characteristics do they come to represent for her?

She focuses on the intensity of its struggles to cling to life. She sees it’s last gasp in which the moth gets back on it’s feet. Once dead, Woolf sees the moth’s dignified acceptance of it’s fate, death. Simply put: life and the struggle to escape death.

The Descriptive Essay

What really happens in our brains when we read descriptive essays...or

anything at all?

Sight SoundTouchTasteSmell

Writing the Descriptive Essay

  Description is used to make the reader feel, to see, to hear, to taste, to smell what the writer is describing.

• Imagery and the Senses:1) Sight

2) Sound

3) Touch

4) Taste

5) Smell

Concrete Details

• Make descriptions clear and easy to see in the imagination.

• Include only indispensable detail• Make objects clear, sharp, and alive.• Figurative devices: Comparisons such as

similes, metaphors, personification.• Set a scene• Provide insight

Showing versus Telling

• Showing means drawing pictures, • Telling means offering judgments.• Sell the “sizzle” not the steak

– A steak is a piece of meat.– The pungent aroma of grilled steak wafted

across the patio and the sight of it sitting there on the grill, juicy and succulent, made my mouth water with anticipation.

• Showing is descriptive telling is informative

Objective Description

• Objective descriptions are technical• Details the writer uses are impersonal, at a

distance, independent of the perceiving mind. 

• Scientific writing relies on objective description. 

Subjective Description

  • Subjective description allows your

personal attitudes and impressions to guide your selection of words to shape your construction of images. 

• You want people to know how you felt about the scene.

Spatial Description

• When describing something (usually a place – but does not have to be) you start at a certain spot and work your way around the room or place from location to location or spatially

• In my bathroom the sink is on the left and the tub is on the right…

Figurative Language

• Metaphor– Winter is a bear

• Simile– Winter is like a bear

• Hyperbole– Take the plank out of your own eye first.

• Personification– The cloud rolled by thinking happy thoughts.

HENRI ROUSSEAU’S SLEEPING GYPSY

Descriptive Practice

As you look at his striking image by the French primitive painter, Henri Rousseau (1844-1910), what is your first impression about the mood or feeling the painting conveys?

PLANNING AND SHAPING

• Study the painting carefully.• Quickly jot down a list of details from the painting

together with ideas about how those details are related.

• Include the lighting, colors, shapes, lines, and textures.

• Re-read your list.• Write a sentence that describes the mood this

painting conveys.

DRAFTING

• Write a paragraph in response to the question: “What mood does Rousseau’s Sleeping Gypsy convey?”

• Be sure to include the details of the painting that contributed to your impression.

Five MinuteDescriptive Free writing