Description
Description can be defined as the expression, in vivid language, of what the five senses experience. A ricly rendered desription freezes a subject in time, evoking sights smells, sounds, textures and tastes in such a way that readers become one with the writer's world.
Description can be a supportive technique that develops part of an essay or it can be the dominant technique used throughout the essay. The overall purpose of the essay would affect the amount of description needed. While your purpose and audience define how much to describe, you have great freedom in deciding what to describe. Description is especially suited to objects but you may also describe a person, animal, place, time, phenomenon or concept.
Description can be divided into two types: objective and subjective. In objective description, you describe the subject in a straightforward and literal way, without revealing your attitudes or feelings. Reporters, as well as technical and scientific writers, specialize in objective description; their jobs depend on their ability to detail experiences without emotional bias. For example, a reporter may write an unemotional account of a town meeting that ended in a fistfight. Or a marine biologist may write a factual report describing the way sea mammals are killed by the plastic refuse that humans throw into the ocea.
In contrast, when writing a subjective description, you convey a highly personal view of our subject and seek to elicit a strong emotional response from your readers. Such subjective descriptions may often take the form of reflective pieces or character studies. For example, in an essay describing the rich plant life in an inner city garden, the writer might reflect on people's longing to connect with the soil and express admiration for the gardener's hard work- and admiration that the writer would like the readers to share. Or a character study of the granfather, the writer might describe his stern appearance and gentle behavior, hoping that the contradiction will move readers as much as it has moved the writer.
The tone of a subjective description is determined by your purpose, your attitude toward the subject, and the reader response you wish to evoke. Consider an essay about a dynamic woman who runs the center for disturbed children. If your goal is to make the readers admire the woman, your tone will be serious and appreciative. But if you want to criticize the woman's high pressure tactics and create distaste for her management style, your tone would be disapproving and severe.
Subjective and objective descriptions often overlap. Sometimes a single sentence contains both objective and subjective elements: "Although his hands were large and misshapen by arthritis, they were both gentle to touch, inspiring confidence and trust.: Other times, part of an essay may provide a factual description, while the other part of the essay may be highly subjective.
Suggestion in Using Description
1. Focus a descriptive essay about a dominant impression
Like other kinds of writing, an essay must have a thesis or main point. In a descriptive essay with a subjective slant, the thesis usually centers around a dominant impression you have about your subject. Although descriptive essays often imply, rather than explicitly state the dominant impressions, that impression would be unmistakeable.
2. Select details to include
The power of description hinges on your ability to select from all possible details onle those that support the dominant impression. All others, no matter how vivid or interesting, must be left out. You may be selective in the number of details you include. Having a dominant impression helps you eliminate many details gathered during pre-writing, but there still will be choices to make. You have to develop heightened powers of observation and recall. To sharpedn these key faculties, it migh be helpful to make up a chart with separate columns for each of the five senses. If you observe your subject directly, enter in the appropriate columns what you see, hear, taste and so on.
3. Organize the descriptive details
Select the organizational pattern (or combination of patterns) that best supports your dominant impression. The paragraphs in a descriptive essay are usually sequenced spatially (top to bottom, interior to exterior, near to far) or chronologically (as subject is experienced in time). But the paragraphs can also be ordered emphatically (ending with your subject's most striking elements) or by sensory impression (first smell, then taste, and so on).
Although descriptive essays don't always have conventional topic sentences, each descriptive paragraph should have a clear focus. Often this focus is indicated by a sentence early in the paragraph that hames the scene, object or individual to be described. Such a sentence functions as a kind of informal topic sentence; the paragraph's descriptive details then develop that topic sentence.
4. Use vivid sensory language and varied sentence stucture
The connotative language typical of subjective desciption should be richly evocative The words you selsct must etch in reader's minds the same picture you have in yours. For this reason, rather than rely on vague generalities, you must use language that involve the reader's senses.
Keep in mind that verbs pack more of a wallop tha adverbs. The following sentence had to rely on adverbs (italicized) because its verbs are too weak: She walked casually in to the room and deliberately tried to pay much attention to their stares." Rewritten so that the verbs (italicized, not adverbs do the bulk of the work, the sentence becomes more powerful: "She strolled in to the room and ignored their stares." Figures of speech- nonliteral imaginative comparisons between two basically dissimilar things are another way to enliven descriptive writing.
When writing descriptive passages, you need to vary the sentence structure. Don't use the same subject-verb pattern in all sentences. These sentences become richer and more interesting when the descriptive elements are embedded, eliminating what would otherwise be a clipped and predictable subject-verb pattern.
Example:
Original sentence: The hall monitors stalked their prey. They hid in the corridors. They remained motionless and ready to sring on any unsuspecting student who tried to sneak into class late.
Sentence with embedded descriptive elements: Stalking their prey, the hall monitors remained hiddedn in the corridors, motionless and ready to spring on any unsuspecting student who dared to sneak into class late.
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