Describing a place

“Descriptive writing is an art form. It’s painting a word picture so that the reader ‘sees’ exactly what you are describing.”

Brenda Covert

(High school teacher)

What’s the big deal about writing descriptively?

For one thing, it’s much more than page-filling fluff.

Descriptive writing imprints images into the reader’s mind, making you feel as though you’re “right there.” It‘s all about engaging the five senses of sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch to transport the reader and stir emotion. By choosing vivid details and colourful words, good writers bring objects, people, places, and events to life. Instead of merely telling you what they see, they use their words to show you.

Writers use this powerful method to make their pieces memorable—even brilliant—rather than dry and boring. In many ways, description is the most important kind of writing you can teach your children because it supports other reasons for writing such as storytelling, informative reports, or persuasion.

Vivid writing is especially important when describing a place—whether to describe a vista for a travel guide or flesh out a scene in a novel.

Master storyteller Charles Dickens was also a master of using description to create a particular mood or idea.

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, arid 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. Charles Dickens, Hard Times

Here, a ninth grader draws on all five senses to describe a place and set an effective mood.

Moist and salty, a chilly breeze blows in across the swells, bringing with it the pungent smells of seaweed and fish and making me pull my jacket a little closer. Sea spray transforms into fiery prisms as the waves splash against the shore, catch the last golden rays of sun, and toss them up like liquid crystals.

Read more here.