A descriptive essay is writing that creates a clear and vivid impression of a particular topic. This means you can write it on anything that can be explained with your senses. Writing a descriptive essay, like any other, takes both time and effort. The more time and effort you put into a descriptive essay, the more powerful it will be. This will properly teach you techniques and approaches you can use to write a successful descriptive essay!
The first step to writing a descriptive essay is making an outline. An outline will help you organize your ideas and ultimately help you understand how to address your readers as a whole. To start your outline you must first identify your topic. Your topic will either be a person, place, or object that will be described in your essay. Next, you will have to choose your main point, which will further explain the topic. The main point should be your main impression which should convey a particular image, overall effect, or feeling to your audience. For example, if you are trying to explain why you love the snow, your main point would be why it does. Whether it is because of the memories it brings back from your childhood or because of its beauty, it should be included in your main point.
Next, you have to pick out supporting details to further explain your main point. These supporting details should appeal to the senses, such as sights, sounds, smells, smells, tastes, and textures. Sights should include details such as colors, shapes, sizes, patterns, and brightness. Sounds should include loud or soft, piercing or soothing, continuous or on-and-off, high or low, and unpleasant or pleasant. Smells should include sweet or sour, new, bad or good, and sharp or mild. Tastes should include good or bad like…, bitter or sugary, and burning or spicy. Textures should include hard or soft, liquids or solids, rough or smooth, and dry or oily. Your support should help bring your story to life and should help your reader understand what’s being described. Place the reader in your shoes.
Next create a good thesis sentence. This can be done easily because your thesis should incorporate both your topic and your main point. Your topic should start the sentence followed by your main point or points. Ensure your thesis is included in the beginning of your sentence, to emphasize the point of your essay early on. This will help keep your readers attention to the remainder of your essay. Reiterate your thesis at the end of your essay, to ensure your reader didn’t forget the point of your essay!
Organize your essay accordingly! If your essay is trying to describe the way a person, place, or object looks like, you will use spatial order. This means you will be describing it from either left to right, right to left, top to bottom, or bottom to top. This will remove any and all potential confusion for your reader. However, if you are describing a particular object for sale, you would use order of important. This means building your audience up, using the weakest feature and slowly progressing to the strongest feature. This is a good marketing strategy because if you lead your reader to thinking the first feature is the best one, then they will be surprised that there is a feature even better. This will encourage your readers to purchase your item.
Now it’s time to write your rough draft. Simply follow your outline, which carefully planned out a majority of your essay. Remember to use transitional words in sentences and to transition from idea to idea. This will help the overall fluency of your essay because it won’t sound like one point after another. You want everything to carefully blend in with one another; otherwise your readers will forget your point and your details. Some transition words to use would be “to the left,” “to the right” “in front of,” “beyond,” “above,” “more,” “the strongest,” etc.
After you write your rough draft, take a break. Go watch a movie, play a game, or simply relax for a few hours. This will help your mind settle some, so when you return you can edit properly. After a few hours, or days, and start the editing process. Be sure to look for misspelled words, grammatical errors, and awkward sentence structures. Revise your essay so that is sounds logical. You may find yourself wanting sentences in different places or just not in your essay at all.
These steps are essential to having a powerful descriptive essay! Just ensure you have enough supporting details to ensure your reader understands what you want them to. If it doesn’t they may miss the point of your essay, which would make the purpose of you writing your descriptive essay invalid. Check for errors extensively, and you will have a perfectly well written descriptive essay to show your potential readers!
