Lesson 8

Descriptive Essay Introduction

 Writer’s Prompt:
• Describe a room in your home in
explicit detail
– Bedroom
– Bathroom
– Living room
– kitchen
–
–
–
–
 Assignment
• Read in Great Writing “Wuthering
Heights” on page 31.
• Answer questions:
– Meaning and Idea
• #3
– Language, Form, Structure
• #2
 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
 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?
• S h e fo cu se s o n th e in te n sity o f its
stru g g le s to clin g to life . S h e se e s it’ s la st
g a sp in w h ich th e m o th g e ts b a ck o n it’ s
fe e t. O n ce d e a d , W o o lf se e s th e m o th ’ s
d ig n ifie d a cce p ta n ce o f it’ s fa te , d e a th .
S im p ly p u t: life a n d th e stru g g le to e sca p e
d e a th .
The Descriptive Essay
 What really happens in
our brains when we read
descriptive essays...or
anything at all?

SightSoundTouch
Sound Taste
Smell
 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:
– Sight
– Sound
– Touch
– Taste
– 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
• Showing is descriptive telling is
informative
•
•
 Objective Description
• Objective descriptions are technical; the
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 Minute
Descriptive Freewriting
David Sedaris