The main aim of a descriptive essay is to create a ‘portrait’ of something. The descriptive essay may delineate a person, a thing, a place, some memory, emotion, or experience. “Unlike a narrative essay, which reveals meaning through a personal story, the purpose of a descriptive essay is to reveal the meaning of a subject through detailed, sensory observation” (Time4Writing). With the help of meticulous examination and images, it endeavours to recreate a profoundly vivacious experience for the reader. The descriptive essay has a familiar structure: introduction, main body, and conclusion. The introduction sets the tone of the work; it typically should grab the readers’ attention and put forward the essay thesis, that is, justify the necessity …show more content…
These things will later help your readers to gain a complete picture and build up an emotional connection with your object. Another way to achieve this aim is to evoke all five senses in your description. Imagine your object and paint in words what it feels like to touch it, to see it, to taste it, to smell it, to hear it. This lets you show, not just tell, what your experience with the object was like. Next, write an outline of your work. The most dominant details, distinguishing the object, can become the items of your plan and, consequently, your topic sentences. You might begin either with more general descriptions and then proceed with specific details or start with the most significant quality / trait. Sensory details will serve as ‘arguments’ and concluding sentences in each paragraph could either restate the topic sentence or serve as links to other paragraphs. As for conclusion, stress once more the significance of your work. To create a lasting impression, find some quote or an intriguing question to leave the reader with. A descriptive essay usually has five paragraphs, but, depending on your purpose, the main body may consist of more than three …show more content…
Sort out through your notes, organize them logically; get rid of minor insignificant details. Once more: focus on showing your object to the reader, not telling. For example, your task is to describe your neighbour. You can, for instance, write, ‘She lived alone in a house and was good at cooking. She liked the old order of things.’ H. E. Bates in the story Halibut Jones portrays, “Miss Parkinson lived alone in a big bay-windowed house of Edwardian brick with a vast garden of decaying fruit trees and untidy hedges of gigantic size. She was great at making elderberry wine and bottling fruit and preserves and lemon curd and drying flowers for winter. She felt, like Halibut, that things were not as they used to be. The synthetic curse of modern times lay thick on everything. There was everywhere a sad drift from Nature.” Or, consider this description of our planet, created by L. T. Gibbons , in her book ‘Project Ark’: “Beyond the haze, the globe was decorated with a mosaic of sapphire, emerald and amber. The planet glittered like a jewel in the moonlight.” Exploit different stylistic devices, for example, similes, hyperboles, and metaphors. They help to enliven the language. Having read your essay, the readers should feel that they know the person described, or have visited that place, relived that experience, tasted those sweets. “Write so the reader will see the sunset, hear the song, smell the flowers, taste the pie, or feel the touch of a hand”
The next element that is important to literary fiction is tone. With tone, you want to ask yourself, are you writing the story and want the reader to feel a certain way. Remember to use intentional tone, don’t worry about being ambitious. Remember to rely on dialogue, not dialogue tags. Be sure to indent so you can control the reader’s focus. Dialogue gets around the narrator; it is a more direct way of showing other characters. The scene will capture the tone you are going for.
There are four main modes of discourse: expository, narrative, descriptive, and persuasive. In Mary Rowlandson’s A Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson, it is apparent in the title that it is a narrative. Like Mrs. Rowlandson’s literature, Olaudah Equiano’s From Africa to America is a narrative. A narrative form of literature is a story, account of events, or experiences, whether it is true or fictitious. In this case their stories were their real experiences and they gave the reader actual facts and information, also making it expository. "The closeness of the place and the heat of the climate, added to the number in the ship, which was so crowded that each had scarcely room to turn himself, almost suffocated us." (73) This is a perfect example showing that Olaudah Equiano’s narrative is also descriptive, giving the reader vivid images in his mind, whereas Rowlandson’s narrative rarely has descriptive content. These works of literature may also be portrayed as persuasive by the quote of, "..Overwhelmed with the thoughts of my condition.." (7) Mary Rowlandson was overwhelmed with her emotions. This quote may persuade the reader ...
The literary devices used in the literary essay are description, definition, examples, narration, compare and contrast, cause and effect, classification and division. On the other hand, the short story uses narrator, setting, characterization, plot and perspective. Lastly, both the literary essay and short story convey life-learning lessons. “In Groups We Shrink” sends the message through examples and description while “The Lesson” uses narration and
By starting this essay with narrative writing he captures the reader’s attention, especially the readers with the same literary repertoire. This is what happened in my case. I have a certain fascination for cars, so when I noticed it was about a car it just grabbed my attention and kept it.
The essay is written in a very critical style where the reader will feel like they have been wast...
"Ms. McMulkin, this is Alex. That essay--- how long can it be?" "Why, uh, not less than 600 words." He sounded a little surprised. I'd forgotten it was late at night. "Can it be longer?" "Certainly, Alex, as long as you want it." "Thanks," I said and hung up. I sat down and picked up my pen and thought for a minute. Remembering. Remembering a handsome, dark boy with a reckless grin and a hot temper. A tough, towheaded boy with a cigarette in his mouth and a bitter grin on his hard face. Remembering- -- and this time it didn't hurt--- a quiet, defeated-looking sixteen-year-old whose hair needed cutting badly and who had black eyes with a frightened expression to them. One week had taken all three of them. And I decided I could tell people, beginning with my English teacher. I wondered for a long time how to start that theme, how to start writing about something that was important to me. And I finally began like this: When I stepped out into the bright sunlight from the darkness of the movie house, I had only two things on my mind: Paul Newman and a ride
The easiest part of the essay was writing about myself I mean who knows more about you than yourself. Since I decided to write about my favorite experience, the words flowed freely and I remember the year of that concert like it happened yesterday. What was difficult for writing this essay was word choice, how to explain my feelings, and the amount of words. Getting prompts that tells the maximum amount of words is awful for me because I love writing excessively and maximum amount of words are my nightmare. However, on this essay, there was a minimum and I had no trouble reaching the minimum. Throughout my school years, I have been great at vocabulary tests and quizzes, but applying those words in my writing has been difficult. Also, I find that writing down feelings is intense and it takes time, especially when you are a teenage girl with a lot of emotions that do not really make sense. Writing this essay without using the words, “Oh my,” and “Ugh,” was difficult for me because those words sums up everything about my experience. I felt like I spent enough time on this essay because I reached the minimum amount, I told my story without missing any detail, and I had a lot of fun writing it without feeling
Thinking that I was strong minded and never looking at the negatives, ones suspicions changed my whole mind setting. After an endless wait in the mournful waiting room of the hospital, my name was called. The nurse brought us to Dr. Yazay's office where he confirmed his suspicions, and so began my life with scoliosis. Since the age of eight I have been swimming. I was a competitive swimmer for nine years, and now had to deal with a life without the activities I felt defined my identity. The treatment for my scoliosis involved wearing the most uncomfortable thing in the world which was a brace. With several restrictions on my physical activity, I had an abundance of free time on my hands.
I went into my educational experience with a wealth of background knowledge about a wide range of topics related to academics, relationships, athletics, and religion. I grew up in a small South Carolina town on a block where there were 48 children who played between the backyards and the park across the street. During the summer, we did not come inside until the street lights came on, and we played kickball, basketball, and baseball regularly. We also spent hours exploring a creek a few blocks away, catching tadpoles or frogs and, if we were really lucky, even snakes. Many of the mothers did not work outside the home and included us as they cooked meals or baked. I was in the first class in our school system to go through completely integrated schools from kindergarten through graduation and witnessed the joy and difficulties associated with changing attitudes concerning “separate but equal.” Most of the families on our block were Lebanese Catholic, and even though we were not, we learned about religion from them as we walked with to and from the church almost weekly for their religious education classes. Both sets of grandparents lived on the block next to us. We often ate dinners there where we were taught formal table manners, table settings, and basic etiquette. My mother worked part time at an historic
A couple of weeks ago, the class was assigned a personal narrative essay and the prompt was to tell an interesting story of a specific experience that changed how you acted, thought, or felt. To be honest, I was awfully excited to write this essay because talking about myself is the easiest thing to write about sometimes. However, deciding what experience to talk about was challenging because I have already experienced so much in my seventeen years of being alive from dislocating my hip when I was three, to seeing my grandfather die in front of my eyes, from almost tripping off of the trail on the Grand Canyon, to meeting band members at an airport. Writing this essay brought me many challenges, I did not know what topic to
The story of my history as a writer is a very long one. My writing has come full circle. I have changed very much throughout the years, both as I grew older and as I discovered more aspects of my own personality. The growth that I see when I look back is incredible, and it all seems to revolve around my emotions. I have always been a very emotional girl who feels things keenly. All of my truly memorable writing, looking back, has come from experiences that struck a chord with my developing self. This assignment has opened my eyes, despite my initial difficulty in writing it. When I was asked to write down my earliest memory of writing, at first I drew a blank. All of a sudden, it became very clear to me, probably because it had some childhood trauma associated with it.
Students have been writing essays since education was formalized centuries ago. There are several formats that they are taught throughout the course of their formal education, two of the most common being; Narrative, and Descriptive. Both of these have distinct characteristics that define them, and while they share many similar qualities and are developed to make the reader immerse themselves in the story. Narratives tend to have the power to capture and persuade on a deeper level than most descriptive papers. Two prime examples are the narrative I Want a Wife by Judy Brady and the descriptive essay Fish Cheeks by Amy tan. While they both do an exceptional job at delivering a lesson Brady’s causes you to think from the beginning, her use of the rhetorical devices such as pathos, ethos, and logos are incorporated with a heavy use of sarcasm and harsh remarks that claws for the reader’s attention.
Effectively using these elements in a piece of literature enhances the reader’s curiosity. One prime example of such usage of these elements is seen in Kate Chopin's writing. Her use of foreshadowing and use of emotional conflicts put into few words in the short piece "The Storm" adds an element that is alluring, holding the reader's interest. In this short piece of literature, a father and son, Bobinot and Bibi, are forced to remain in a store where they were shopping before the storm, waiting for the storm to pass over them. In the meantime, the wife and mother, Calixta, whom is still at home, receives an unexpected visit from a former lover named Alicee. The two have an affair and the story starts to come together. The story shows us how we tend to want what we beli...
The New Critics, just like Wimsatt and Beardsley put forward in their essay, also believed in the ‘organicity’ of the text. In the essay, they write, “A poem should not mean but be.” And, since the meaning of the poem or the text is the medium through which it can exist, and words, in turn, is the medium through which the meaning is expressed, the poem or the text b...
My aspiration toward a better education starts all the way back to when I started school in Russia. Out of the short educational experience that I had in Russia, I remember that almost everybody wanted to be the straight-A student (or straight-"5" by Russian grading). That, combined with the constant pressure from my family helped me get excited about school and made me want to learn. My education in Russia was cut short, however, when we moved to the United States.