Description
What is Description?
The purpose of description is to:
Description involves recounting something (or someone, or some place) using sensory details. "Descriptive discourse enables the audience to develop a mental picture of what is being discussed" (literarydevices.net, 2016). Your job as a descriptive writer is to "paint a picture" for the reader. The reader should be able to form a mental impression of the person, place, or object you are describing. |
Helpful Links:
Please click the link buttons below to learn more about the content and structure of descriptive essays.
From the Online Writing Lab at Purdue University:
Descriptive Writing Examples
Character Sketch:
From Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone by J. K. Rowling (Scholastic, 1998)
From The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain (Hayes Barton Press, 2005, originally published 1885)
From A Separate Peace by John Knowles (Simon & Schuster, 2003, originally published 1959)
Examples from ReadWriteThink.org
From Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone by J. K. Rowling (Scholastic, 1998)
- He was a big, beefy man with hardly any neck, although he did have a very large mustache. Mrs. Dursley was thin and blonde and had nearly twice the usual amount of neck, which came in very useful as she spent so much of her time craning over garden fences, spying on the neighbors. (p. 1)
- A giant of a man was standing in the doorway. His face was almost completely hidden by a long, shaggy mane of hair and a wild, tangled beard, but you could make out his eyes, glinting like black beetles under all the hair. (p. 46)
From The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain (Hayes Barton Press, 2005, originally published 1885)
- He was almost fifty, and he looked it. His hair was long and tangled and greasy, and hung down, and you could see his eyes shining through like he was behind vines. It was all black, no gray; so was his long, mixed-up whiskers. There warn’t no color in his face, where his face showed; it was white; not like another man’s white, but a white to make a body sick, a white to make a body’s flesh crawl – a tree-toad white, a fish-belly white. As for his clothes – just rags, that was all. He had one ankle resting on t’other knee; the boot on that foot was busted, and two of his toes stuck through, and he worked them now and then. His hat was laying on the floor – an old black slouch with the top caved in, like a lid. (p. 11)
From A Separate Peace by John Knowles (Simon & Schuster, 2003, originally published 1959)
- For such and extraordinary athlete—even as a Lower Middler Phineas had been the best athlete in the school—he was not spectacularly built. He was my height—five feet eight and a half inches...He weighed a hundred and fifty pounds, a galling ten pounds more than I did, which flowed from his legs to torso around shoulders to arms and full strong neck in an uninterrupted, unemphatic unity of strength. (p.16)
Examples from ReadWriteThink.org
Place Description:
"Landscape" by Dorothy Parker Now this must be the sweetest place From here to heaven's end; The field is white and flowering lace, The birches leap and bend, The hills, beneath the roving sun, From green to purple pass, And little, trifling breezes run Their fingers through the grass. |
So good it is, so gay it is, So calm it is, and pure. A one whose eyes may look on this Must be the happier, sure. But me- I see it flat and gray And blurred with misery, Because a lad a mile away Has little need of me. |
Key Topics
- Object description, Place description, Character sketch
- Characterization: Direct and Indirect
- STEAL: Speech, Thoughts, Effect on others, Actions, Looks
- Sensory description: Auditory, Olfactory, Gustatory, Tactile, Visual
- "To be" verbs
- Cliche
- Organization: Spatial, Chronological
- Point-of-View: First, Second, and Third person
- Narrative past tenses
- Rough comparisons
- Figurative language