Thursday, 9th of September 2010, 09:41 AM

Description Essay

Suppose, you had a task of describing an appearance of something – an object, a person, or a place? What would be your idea of arranging words in sentences in a paragraph to reach the maximum clarity? Apparently, you would care little about time order; instead, your primary interest would be the physical appearance and location of things. The structure of your prose, thus, would reflect details in terms of spatial organization. Whenever you write a description essay, you have to make the location of things described extremely clear.

Description of a place

When describing a room, what would the most convenient to discuss first? The walls, or maybe, the floor? Basically, there can be no clear-and-cut pattern of arranging sentences in a description essay. This means that the writer has no obligation to move on from one area to another in any set order. At the same time, a descriptive paragraph should still have coherence of a certain kind; it should not chaotically and randomly organized. The main task would be to make the reader easily visualize things you are describing. It is not likely to happen in case of a chaotic description. Put yourself in the reader’s shoes first; try, for example to imagine that you have to instruct a home designer how to arrange his work in your room. It would be very stupid if you told the guy to paint your ceiling white and your bed brown, and then put up pictures on the wall before actually starting on painting the wall. Such instructions would be chaotic and would apparently irritate the artist. Same goes for your descriptive paragraph and your reader’s reaction, as it is the reader who will have to mentally recreate the structure of things and objects based on the words you write.

How you arrange details in your description largely depends on your subject. You have to know your purpose and your reader well. The details in your description should be not only logical in its appearance but rather, vivid, as well. The reader has to grasp the mental picture of the scene as clearly and precisely as possible; otherwise he will be left only with a vague sense of what you tried to convey. To be vivid enough, the details have to be very specific. So, if you want to make your writing more interesting and captivating, make sure you really let the reader visualize the object you describe in many interesting details.