The document provides guidance on writing effective descriptive pieces through the use of sensory details, vivid vocabulary, and imagery. It emphasizes selecting precise words that create clear mental images for the reader. Descriptions should focus on the five senses of sight, sound, smell, taste, and touch to immerse the reader in the scene. Excessive or boring descriptions are discouraged in favor of a few carefully chosen similes and metaphors to strengthen the impact. Mood and specificity are also important elements of descriptive writing highlighted in the document.

2. By the end of the lesson, students should be able
to :
• Understand the essential techniques of writing a
good descriptive piece,
• Know the various ways in which vocabulary can
enrich a given text,
• Understand how too much description becomes
redundant.

3. • An effective written description is one that
presents a clear picture to your reader.
• A successful description uses vivid vocabulary,
including colorful adjectives and figurative
language.
• An interesting description attracts the readers’
attention.

4. • Imagery is the use of words to create images, or mental
pictures. Imagery helps you picture how something:
 Looks
 Feels
 Smells
 Tastes
 Sounds
• Can you imagine a car journey? What might you see, touch, smell, taste
and hear?
• See: Like a fiery red fist, the Ferrari Testarossa punched its way past our ageing Ford
Fiesta...
• Touch: the open window allowed a cool spring breeze to caress my cheeks
• Smell: an ancient jalopy of a school bus spluttered along in front of us spewing out
nauseous black clouds of exhaust...
• Taste: the bitter taste of the pre-trip travel sickness pill still clung to back of my throat.
• Hear: the screeching siren of an ambulance forced us to pull in and wait till it passed...

5. ‘Dark shapes glide through the night sky on silent wings, their sinister
shadows outlined against the light of the full moon. Swooping down to
the earth, they hover near houses and deserted buildings, breaking the
peace of the night with their disturbing presence. Carriers of disease,
drinkers of blood, companions of witches and demons, bats – the very
word brings a shiver of fear to most people.’ - Sylvia A. Johnson, Bats.
Anybody could see how cold it got. The wind already had glass edges
to it, stiffening muscles and practically cutting through the stitches of
our clothes. When it blew, the chill stabbed our teeth like icicles, and
our voices jiggled every time we talked.’ – Victor Martinez, Parrot in the
Oven: Mi Vada.

6. The villa was small and square, standing in its tiny garden with an air of pink-faced
determination. Its shutters had been faded by the sun to a delicate creamy-green,
cracked and bubbled in places. The garden, surrounded by tall fuchsia hedges, had
the flower beds worked in complicated geometrical patterns, marked with smooth
white stones. The white cobbled paths, scarcely as wide as a rake’s head, wound
laboriously round beds hardly larger than a big straw hat, beds in the shape of
stars, half-moons, triangles, and circles all overgrown with a shaggy tangle of flowers
run wild. Roses dropped petals that seemed as big and smooth as saucers, flame-
red, moon-white, glossy, and unwrinkled; marigolds like broods of shaggy suns stood
watching their parent’s progress through the sky. The warm air was thick with the
scent of a hundred dying flowers, and full of the gentle, soothing whisper and
murmur of insects. – Gerald Durell, My Family and Other Animals.

7. It was a town of red brick, or of brick that would have been red if the smoke and ashes
had allowed it; but as matters stood, it was a town of unnatural red and black like the
painted face of a savage. It was a town of machinery and tall chimneys, out of which
interminable serpents of smoke trailed themselves for ever and ever, and never got
uncoiled. It had a black canal in it, and a river that ran purple with ill-smelling dye, and
vast piles of building full of windows where there was a rattling and a trembling all day
long, and where the piston of the steam-engine worked monotonously up and down,
like the head of an elephant in a state of melancholy madness. It contained several
large streets all very like one another, and many small streets still more like one
another, inhabited by people equally like one another, who all went in and out at the
same hours, with the same sound upon the same pavements, to do the same work,
and to whom every day was the same as yesterday and tomorrow, and every year the
counterpart of the last and the next. – Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities.

8. • Imagine yourself to be a kind of 'human video camera‘: Imagine you
are going to 'record' what was in the particular scene or situation the
question asks you to describe.
• Describe - as appropriate to the scene - what you saw, heard, tasted,
smelt and felt - that is, use sensory description.
• Write about a past event using past tense verbs throughout!
• While using the present tense, it's far too easy to forget the time
frame and flip back into using past tense verbs without
realising. This is poor style, very confusing for the reader and worst
of all... will lose m-a-n-y marks!
• Use precise vocabulary; the kind of words that almost contain their
own description and which etch themselves into the mind of your
reader.

9. • Avoid excessive, flat or boring description.
Cool water flows through the rocky banks of the creek and into a wide
pond. Reeds and cattails surrounding the bank embrace the pond like a
mother’s enfolding arms reaching out to caress her sleeping child. Like
a beaming proud mother’s eye, the sun drenches the scene with its
loving warmth. Just beneath the sparkling surface of the water,
minnows shoot from rock to rock like silver darts thrust like scattershot
by some unseen hand.

10. • Avoid excessive, flat or boring description.
Cool water flows through the rocky banks of the creek and into a wide
pond. Reeds and cattails surrounding the bank embrace the pond like a
mother’s enfolding arms reaching out to caress her sleeping child. Like
a beaming proud mother’s eye, the sun drenches the scene with its
loving warmth. Just beneath the sparkling surface of the water,
minnows shoot from rock to rock like silver darts thrust like scattershot
by some unseen hand.

11. • Avoid excessive, flat or boring description.
Cool water flows through the rocky banks of the creek and into a wide
pond. Reeds and cattails surround the bank. The sun drenches the
scene with its warmth. Just beneath the sparkling surface of the water,
minnows shoot from rock to rock.

12. • Describing all your nouns with extra adjectives actually weakens the
description.
• What strengthens description a great deal is to use
a few but carefully chosen and vivid similes and metaphors e.g. 'He
looked like a man just back from a journey to Hell'; 'Her cheeks
were glowing like the ripest of ripe strawberries!'
• Help your reader feel as if he or she were actually there,
experiencing the thing being described.

13. • It's important to use your description to create, develop or assist a
mood suited to your subject matter or theme.
• Good descriptive writing depends on choosing exactly the right word
to communicate what is in your mind. Consider the following
sentences.
• The teacher came into the classroom and sat on his chair behind
the desk.
• The teacher drifted into the classroom and slumped into his chair
behind the desk.
• The teacher stormed into the classroom and positioned himself on
the chair behind his desk.

18. • Be specific, not vague.
• Elaborate (add more details and expand your ideas)
• Use vivid vocabulary
• Include details that relate to your five senses.
• Wherever possible, show, don't tell!