Design and meaning, writing ideas.

Writing a (personal) Description

Writer's Goal is to describe a subject (a person, place, object, animal, or combination of these) so clearly and richly that the reader can step into the subject and experience its meaning. Descriptive writing paints a picture in words, it appeals to a reader's senses - sight, sound, smell, taste, and touch.

Keys for Success

Be curious. Set out to learn more about your subject than you know now. Review easy-to-recall memories, but then dig out those hard-to-grasp details that hide in the shadows. If possible, examine the subject up close by looking at photos, interviewing the person, or touring the site.

Be bold. Describe what you see. Help the reader smell both the roses and the rubbish. Strive to create a powerful dominant impression—a strong sense of the subject's essential nature, overall value, or personal meaning.

Be precise. Reading a description that uses almost-the-right words can be disappointing Choose nouns, verbs, and modifiers that put details in focus for the reader.

Be vivid. Use a variety of techniques to make your description lively, beginning with your senses.

Guidelines

1. Choose a subject that means something special to you, one that you want to share with readers.

People who influenced you: parents, grandparents, siblings, uncles, aunts, friends, neighbors, teachers, cousins, colleagues, employers, or employees; places with special significance: childhood hiding place, teenage hangout, favorite place to read, vacation spot, park, restaurant, or graveyard; objects, creatures, and occasions: a special gift, the tools of your trade, an animal encounter, a storm and its damage, a party, a play, a sports event.

2. Get the big picture. Establish the big picture first by answering these questions about your topic:

• What are your topic's names? What words are associated with the topic?

• What is this person, place, object, or animal all about? What is its character, heart, or essence?

• What is this topic's meaning for you, and why is it meaningful? What is your relationship to it?

• What are the dimensions, elements, or parts of this person, place, object, or animal?

• What is the topic's history?

3. Tap the Senses. List sensory details:

• Colors, shapes, and movements that you saw

• Sounds that you heard

• Smells, tastes, and textures that you remember

4. Deepen the description. Experiment with a number of strategies that will help make your description vivid and memorable:

• Develop comparisons for your topic. Play with similes, metaphors, and analogies that might help readers see your topic more clearly and understand it more fully.

• Develop anecdotes about your topic. What stories characterize this place or object? What behaviors, events, and activities define this person or creature? Through freewriting, flesh out these anecdotes. When appropriate, include quotations or dialogue.

5. Choose a dominant impression. At this point, tentatively decide which overall idea, theme, and/or emotion you want to convey through description. What truth about the topic and your relationship with it do you want to share?

6. Think organization. If you're ready to write, go for it. But it may also be good to think through how best to organize and build your description - moving from general overview to specific parts, from distant view to close-up, from context to detail, from left to right, from top to bottom, from front to back—or the reverse. Consider how to start and how to finish.

7. Write your first draft. If the words flow freely, rough out the entire essay. But if you get stuck, go back to the material that you developed and consider where you could insert an item, describe a trait, or include additional details. If you're still blocked, choose one trait or detail, and freewrite for a few minutes, letting the writing take you wherever it wants to go.

8. Revise the Writing. Read the draft by asking questions like the following:

• Is the dominant impression created the one you want to create?

• Does the organizational pattern work, leading the reader effectively through parts of the topic?

• Does the opening grab the reader's attention and set up what follows?

• Do the middle paragraphs give helpful pictures of the subject—each revealing a new facet of the person, place, object, or creature?

• Is the description filled with vivid details, enlightening anecdotes, and sharp comparisons?

• Does the closing complete the word picture and unify the essay?

9. Get feedback. Ask someone to read both your assignment and your essay, using the following questions:

• Does the essay accomplish the assigned task? What dominant impression does it create?

• Is the description vivid, suggestive, clear, engaging, and complete?

• Does it read easily, with smooth sentences and clear transitions between paragraphs?

10. Edit the essay for clarity and correctness, check the following:

• Are verbs vivid and nouns precise?

• Are adverbs and adjectives used effectively to clarify verbs and nouns?

• Do sentences read smoothly? In particular, do transitions like above,beneath, and near guide readers through the description?

• Are capitalization, usage, and spelling correct?

11. Publish the essay. Share your essay with a broad audience:

• Publish the essay on appropriate Web sites (including your own).

• Submit the essay for competition in a writing contest.

• Give copies to family members and friends.

Tasks.

Read the model and perform the activities that follow. As you read, notice the writers' topics and writing strategies. Consider choosing a parallel topic or using similar strategies.

You know what descriptive writing is. It makes you smile or sigh; it causes shivers to run up your spine; it brings tears to your eyes; it makes you say to yourself, "Yes, that's just it. That's just what it's like."

Although you may seldom need to produce long passages of pure description except for your own personal satisfaction, good descriptive details are welcome in almost every kind of writing. Besides adding liveliness and interest to your work, clear description helps keep your readers from getting fogged in by abstractions and generalities.

But how is it done? What can you do with that limp paragraph you just wrote, lying there like yesterday's lunch? What you need to do is add images or create atmosphere. Images usually create mental pictures, but they can appeal imaginatively to emotions and to other senses besides sight. In the poem "Auto Wreck" Karl Shapiro describes the flashing light of an ambulance this way:"... one ruby flare/Pulsing out red light like an artery." Surely that image prompts you to envision blood gushing from a wound, as well as crimson light streaming from a revolving flasher.

In adding small descriptive details you need to be especially sensitive to all the words you know that will convey thoughts and feelings. Choose the most specific one, precisely the right one. If you have written, "I felt terrible about what happened," you need to question yourself closely as you revise. Exactly how did you feel: humiliated, guilty, fearful, frustrated, sickened, or sad? Consult a thesaurus (a dictionary of synonyms) if you can't come up with the exact word. Consider always the many gradations and fine distinctions among feelings you may want to express. Were you restless, bored, exhausted, enervated, or brain dead? Impressed, surprised, shocked, astounded, or stunned? You don't need to add a slew of words to the page to achieve clear description. Just make sure the words you choose are the words you want.

Atmosphere is another component of descriptive writing. Atmosphere, which is quite similar to mood or tone, it shades into tone, which is named as an emotion: A piece of writing can be depressing, cheerful, breathlessly exciting, hopeful, glum, humorous, expectant, anxious, nostalgic. Shapiro's image of the red light on the ambulance conveys a feeling of dread or danger partly because of its actual nature (a warning light) and partly because of its imaginative suggestion of spilled blood. The image has infinitely more impact than cold statements like, "An ambulance came up, flashing its red light," or even, "The flashing red light of the approaching ambulance gave me the creeps." Atmosphere is achieved through the use of images and other carefully selected specific details.

The reading contains strong images, note how effectiveness through descriptive techniques is achieved - exact word choice, clear images, and precise selected details. Study these techniques; imitate them; adapt them to suit yourself - and your writing also can sparkle.

The Mudbacks

dereck williamson

Besides producing humorous articles for popular magazines,

Williamson, a journalist, also writes amusing "do-it-yourself books.

The following bit of nostalgia about bicycles in the good old days

appeared in the Saturday Review in June of 1971.

I see by the local paper that the New Jersey town where I live will hold a bicycle safety check next week. The chief of police will inspect bikes at the municipal parking lot; checking "brakes, lights, sounding devices, reflectors, and general bike condition. Those bikes which are approved will be marked with a 1971 inspection sticker."

I remember the bike I had when I was a kid. We didn't have bike inspections in those days, and it was a lucky thing. My bike would have flunked. Everybody's bike would have failed, mostly on "general bike condition."

Many safety devices were missing. One kid had no handle bars. And take reflectors. None of the bikes had reflectors because the reflectors were fastened to the fenders, and the fenders got torn off early in the game. Nobody worried about fenders; you worried about spokes. It was very important to have enough spokes so that the wheel remained more or less round. Each of my bike wheels had thirty-six spokes, and I found by experience that I couldn't afford to lose more than twenty. When a wheel lost too many spokes it began to sag and it was difficult to ride the bike fast.

The whole point was to ride the bike fast. You could tell a really fast bike rider by the streak of mud up his back.

I don't recall any of the bikes having "sounding devices." Once in a while, fan bike came equipped with a "tank" mounted between the upper-frame bars. Inside the tank was an electric horn that made a thin beeping sound for bout a day. Then the battery corroded, and the whole bike turned green.

The most popular sounding device was the bike rider himself. He screamed when confronted by any obstacle, real or imaginary. Sometimes his voice changed in mid-scream, a terrible noise that could raise the mud on the back of your neck.

There were three popular ways of stopping a bike - "coaster brake," "hand brake " and "hitting something." Less popular methods included accidentally sticking your foot in the front wheel or clamping hard on just the front hand brake, which made you do a tight little somersault over the handle bars.

Another rather sloppy way to stop was to get your pantcuff caught between the front sprocket and the chain, causing a sudden shift of weight to starboard. You slowly fell off the bike and scraped along the ground. The bike, still attached to your leg, jarred around on top of you until an axle bolt stuck in your ear.

Few bikes had built-in lights. For riding at night, you just stuck a flashlight in a metal bracket mounted on the handle bars. During the day, the bracket stuck up and lacerated your chest whenever you ran into something.

A safety inspection also would have produced penalty points for loose seats and handle bars caused by stripped bolts or no bolts, missing pedal parts (just a spike stuck out), lack of air in the tires, or lack of tires to put air in.

No bike would have had a prayer of passing a modern inspection. It's just as well. There was no place to put a sticker anyway.

DESIGN AND MEANING, writing ideas.

1. Does Williamson use an informal or a formal style? How can you tell? Why do you think he chose this style?

2. Williamson's essay is humorous because he exaggerates (see paragraph 5) and he uses unexpected phrasing ("There were three popular ways of stopping a bike - 'coaster brake,' 'hand brake,' and 'hitting something.'"). Find more examples of exaggeration and unexpected phrasing. What other elements appeal to your sense of humor?

3. can you picture the mudbuck' bikes? what specific detail appeal to you?

4. Make a list of phrases (about 25) that describe an object you are specially fond of now or were fond of as a child. Do not forget to appeal to senses other than sight.

5. Using an informal style, write an essay that describes some element of your childhood that you see as quite different from its replacement for children of younger generation. (some possibilities: dolls, bikes, books, cartoons).

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