Painting Word Pictures: The Essay of Description
To be successful, an essay of description relies on imagery. Your readers depend on your words alone in order to see, hear, smell, taste, or feel your subject. For example:
In this sentence, readers can see, feel, and taste the rain, can hear the scream, and can therefore get a good picture of the narrator's predicament.
Onomatopoetic words (words that sound like the meaning they express) help convey imagery and impact. The
Use description for a number of reasons. In a short story or novel, description of a setting helps readers feel closer to the characters or the plot because they can see and appreciate the environment. In a nonfiction work, description helps readers know how a finished product should look (or feel, taste, smell, or sound).
In writing a description, ask yourself, “What dominant impressions do I want to convey?” Do you want readers to appreciate the beauty and scent of the spring flowers you saw on a recent walk? Or do you want to convey the various smells and tastes that you remember from your grandmother's kitchen at Thanksgiving dinner? Or perhaps you want to express the unsightliness and rancid smell of a local landfill you've visited.
In these examples, you'll convey subjective images, so you're allowed to use words that may otherwise be seen as biased. However, if you're describing something objectively (such as a particular building, giving its height, occupancy, history, and so on), don't use words that give a particular bias to your subject.
Works of description rely on details, so be generous with them. Since description relates to as many of the senses as possible, use adjectives and adverbs liberally. In addition, take a look at the verbs you use and see if you can substitute ones that are more descriptive or precise. Instead of writing, “Lemour Elianor walked into the room,” for example, give readers a better look at how the man entered. Did he tiptoe into the room? bound? slink? prance? Each of those verbs gives a better picture of what happened. Now add adjectives and adverbs. Did the well-dressed man scurry into the room breathlessly? Did the always-late man tiptoe into the room hesitantly?
While you should choose your descriptive words carefully, don't overuse them. Keep in mind that every noun doesn't need an adjective (much less two or three) and every verb doesn't need an adverb.
