Descriptive Writing

A piece of writing that explains in great detail a particular event, experience, person or place.

Past Year Descriptive Titles

1. Which person has had the most positive impact on your life? Nov 2019
Describe this individual’s personality and what ways he or she has
influenced you.
2. Describe an event that you looked forward to which turned out to Nov 2018
be disappointing. Explain why you were excited about it and why it
didn’t live up to your expectations.
3. Describe a place which means a great deal to you. Why is it so Nov 2017
important?
4. Describe a childhood toy, or game you played, which still means a Nov 2016
great deal to you. Why is it so important?
5. Describe the possession that matters most to you and explain why Nov 2015
you would never be prepared to part with it.
6. Describe how you celebrated an important family occasion. Why Nov 2014
will this event always remain in your memory?
7. Which person has the greatest influence on your life at the present Nov 2014
time, and why?
8. Describe some of you experiences in food courts and hawker Nov 2013
centres. How important are these places in your life as a teenager
in Singapore?
9. Describe an annual event which you enjoy and explain why it is so Nov 2012
important to you.
10. Describe how a religious or national event is celebrated in your Nov 2011
country.
11. Describe the location and main features of your ideal home and Nov 2010
explain why you think it would be the ideal place to live
12. Write about some of the things in your country you value most and Nov 2007
would miss greatly, if you had to live in another country.
13. It is not only shopping that brings visitors to Singapore. Describe Nov 2005
some other tourist attractions and say why you think visitors enjoy
them.
14. Describe one of the large shopping malls in Singapore. Why does Dec 2004
it attract so many customers?
15. ‘What a wonderful sound!’ Write about some of the sounds you Nov 2003
like best and why they mean so much to you.
16. Describe the sights and sounds as students gather on the first Nov 2002
morning of a new school term.
17. Write about an important public building in your area and describe Nov 2001
what goes on there.
18. Describe how a family discussion brought about a happy outcome. Nov 2000
19. Describe a scene outside a sports stadium immediately before an June 2000
important match.

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Common Errors/Concerns in Descriptive Writing.

1. Emphasis on Narration and Recount

- preoccupied in telling what happen first, what next, failing to include essential
elements of description.

2. Too brief and overused adjectives

3. Insufficient number of words

4. Telling Vs Showing

Telling Showing
( Morning bus ride) (Morning bus ride)
Each morning, I ride the bus to school. I wait A bus arrived. It discharged its passengers,
along with other people who ride my bus. closed its doors with a hiss and disappeared
Sometimes the bus is late and we get angry. over the crest of the hill. Not one of the people
Some guys start fights and stuff just to have waiting at the bus stop attempted to board.
something to do. I’m always glad when my bus One woman wore a sweater that was too
finally arrives. small, a long skirt, white sweater socks and
house slippers. One man was in his
undershirt. Another man wore shoes with the
toes cut out, a soiled blue jacket and brown
pants. There was something wrong with these
people. They made faces. A mouth smiled at
nothing and unsmiled, smiled and unsmiled. A
head shook in vehement denial.

(A tired woman) (A tired woman)

Sitting on the sofa, she looked exhausted. Sitting on the sofa, she looked exhausted. Her
eyes told of her pain – deep, set back,
reaching inside of herself. Dark caves formed
where her cheeks were. Her mouth was a
hardened straight line.
Telling: (Hide and Seek) (Hide and Seek)

Leonardo was approaching her. He was She could hear him near the barn, his
getting closer and closer. She thought she was footsteps crunching on the gravel. Next he
going to be caught. was on the lawn, and the sounds of the wet
grass scraping against his boots made a loud
squeaky noise. Before she knew it, she could
hear him breathing.

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 Describing People:
Age Build Height Hair Colour Hairstyle Face Distinguishing Personality
Features
young fat 1.70m jet-black long round Pouty lips Quiet
middle age thin average- brown short chiseled pock mark moody
elderly slim height red straight heart- dimples temperamental
old plump dwarf-like blonde wavy shaped scar sociable
in his 30s/40s medium- tall brunette curly oval double chin bubbly
in his late 20s built short dyed unkempt high mole shy
teens broad - lanky dark with a fringe cheekbones wrinkles thoughtful
in her mid 20s shouldered grey swept back high birth mark reserved
overweight moss-green pony-tail forehead unshaven noisy
curvy pigtail liver spots nosey parker
in a bun sly
receding smooth talker
hairline witty
balding clumsy clod
thinning friendly
party animal
Eyes Complexion Dress

blue pale sophisticated

hazel olive elegant
grey skinned scruffy
deep set sun kissed well-
single eyelid fair groomed
cat dark trendy
slit smart
conservative

Describing a Person

a. Physical characteristics

b. Personality
 Unusual/ frequent habits

c. Experience
 e.g. entering the person’s room
Sample:

What she was wearing would not look out of place in a circus. Cassandra’s dress sense was as
good as a clown about to entertain a bunch of old folks. Her extremely bright shade of magenta
skirt and yellow top would have brought traffic to an abrupt stop. She had hair perfect for a
family of sparrows and she spoke with an incomprehensible accent. She had a disturbing habit
of roaming the streets at night in a fuchsia pink diving suit.

Sample:

As I walked through a dim lit corridor, a lady walked past. She did not seem to belong to this
generation or even this planet. Two coconut shells covered her chest and broad leaves that
were sewn together hung at her waist. She looked really funny. For a lady, the hair covering her
body was unusually thick, long and green. Surprisingly she hardly had any hair on her head.
She was like an experiment gone wrong. My nose twitched as she brushed past me. I rushed
to the nearest restroom!
DESCRIBING PLACES

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Use your senses

A scene in a shopping centre.

Senses Descriptive Details

Sight
- long queues at the cashiers and the fitting rooms
- shoppers rummaging through the shopping carts
- shoppers carrying bags of items
- posters of price reductions – 50% off Grab Now!
- sales assistants luring customers to their shops
- children running through the rows of clothes

Hearing - in-house music

- sound of bar-code scanners
- friends comparing prices
- compliments to each other
- sales staff explaining use of items
- customer complaining loudly
- children wailing for toys
-
Smell - perfume smell
- aroma of food from food courts
- body odour
- sour smell of sweat
- pungent smell of fart

Taste - food sample

- drinks
Touch - texture of items
- sticky rails of escalators
- warm seats
- feel of money

Examples:

The room where we stayed was of poor standard. Laundry and used towels were all over the
room and beer bottles were strewn all over staining the carpeted room. There were even crusts
of half-eaten pizza beside the bed and it was swarmed with red ants. It was a mess and looked
worse than a pig-sty. A broken ash-stray was on the floor with dozens of cigarette butts left
unpicked.

It was like a dense jungle made up of clothes. Heaps of laundry and unfinished food were
everywhere giving the room a pungent and musty smell. My friends found my bed lamp
especially unique. Guess what covered the bulb? My leopard prints underwear! If I were to
release Madagascar cockroaches into my room, they would not survive a minute. I navigated
through the swampy floor towards my cupboard to look for a clean pair of clothing. To my
dismay my pile of clothes was infested with ants. I had left some chicken bones on top of it!

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Describing an Experience

 combines elements of narration and recount

 give greater emphasis on descriptive details

 combine techniques of describing a person and describing a place

 include elements of feelings, emotions as a result of that experience, during the

experience, before the experience

 explain how you felt:

 Don’t just say you were bored! How bored were you? Don’t just say very bored?
Elaborate!!

Useful Phrases
Early morning:

“The sun was pouring bars of golden liquid through my window and the birds were singing
merrily at the top of their voices.”

“I was blinded by the terrible glare of the sun shining directly on me. I could barely open my
eyes and in a limp state of consciousness, I clawed my way out of bed.”

In a hurry:

“I eagerly threw on my clothes and sprang down the stairs.”

Describing a Loud Noise:

“The thunderous roar of the rollercoaster sounded like a thunder cloud that has sunk in my ear
and exploded.”

Describing fear:

My heart was beating a thousand times per second and I had to stop walking to get a grip of
myself. My palms had instantly become damp as a million thoughts flooded my mind. What
if……

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Descriptive Writing and the Five Senses
One of the key things that a passage of descriptive writing should do is appeal to all five of the
senses. Appeal to the sense of sight only (how things look) and your writing will lack dimension.

Take a look at this list of things you might use to describe a character...

 His almost-black hair

 The scar on his chin that only shows up in a certain light
 His chewed fingernails
 His ripped jeans
There's nothing wrong with using one or more of these details to describe the character –
except that they engage only the sense of sight. Descriptive writing that is one-dimensional like
that can be tedious.

Here are some other things you could say about the character...

 He wears too much aftershave (smell)

 His lips taste sweet like ripe fruit (taste)
 He has a high-pitched laugh (sound)
 His hair feels wiry (touch)
Exactly the same thing applies to describing a place. These descriptions of a beach all appeal to
the sense of sight...

 The tiny pink shells in the white sand.

 The way the sea is the same blue as the sky, making it hard to tell where one ends and
the other begins.
 The rocks still wet from high tide.
But these apply to all of the other senses...

 The smell of caught fish from the fishing boat (smell).

 The faint taste of salt on the breeze (taste).
 The screeching herring gulls (sound).
 The slippery rocks (feel/touch).
Bottom line? When describing something don't restrict yourself to the purely visual. Also think
about how a person or a place smells, tastes, sounds and feels.

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1. The Sense of Sight

Your best bet here? Don't attempt to paint the full picture, describing every tree and building
and passing dog in sight. Instead...

1. Focus on just a handful of details (and allow readers to paint the rest of the picture for
themselves).
2. Make those details the best ones you can find.
You can make a reader "see" with very little (their brain will do the rest). And precisely the same
thing applies to making them hear, taste, touch and smell.

2. The Sense of Smell

Smell is the most nostalgic of the senses. Which of us isn't transported back to school when we
smell our favourite meal, or to childhoods when we smell the ground after a heavy downpour?

For descriptive writing, evoking the sense of smell is a great way of saying a lot with very few
words. Try to imagine the following...

 The smell of a woodland in summer after rain.

 Sour milk in the refrigerator.
 The first smell of the sea through a car window.
3. The Sense of Sound

People speaking and coughing and banging things with hammers is one way of adding a
soundtrack to a scene. Another way is to incorporate the sense of sound into the description of
places.

So if you're describing a seaside setting, for example, mention screeching gulls and waves
breaking on pebbles to add an extra dimension to the description.If you're describing a person
walking through a hotel lobby, mention his metal heels clicking on the marble, or the jangle of
loose change in his pocket.

Sounds can sometimes be tricky to describe accurately, so here is a good place to use a figure
of speech. One solution is an onomatopoeia...

 Jangle
 Clatter
 Crash
Similes work well, too – "the cry of the fox sounded like a child in terrible pain."

4. The Sense of Taste

You'll mostly evoke the sense of taste under two circumstances – when characters are eating
and drinking. But always look for ways to incorporate it in more unexpected situations in your
writing. For example...

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  When a character arrives at the beach, the usual thing would be to have them smell the
sea. Instead, have them taste the salt on the breeze.
 When a young boy captures a frog at the bottom of the garden, have him lick it... then
recoil.
 When a woman returns to her childhood home, have her taste her mother's roast
chicken when she's still 100 miles away.
Even if you don't actually describe a taste, just mentioning the thing we taste with – the tongue –
can be powerful in descriptive fiction. For example...

 It's the first icy day of winter and it starts to snow. A character looks up and tries to catch
the flakes on her tongue.
 Further down the street, her younger brother licks a metal pole.
5. The Sense of Touch

Like all five of the senses, touch can be painful or pleasurable.

Make it pleasurable, like the feel of cool cotton sheets on a summer night, and the readers will
experience the pleasure along with the character.

Make it painful, like being head-butted on the nose, and the readers will wince. Like you just did.

Sometimes, a touch is neither painful nor pleasurable, but simply helps to describe the person
or the place...

 A greasy stove.
 Cracked lips.
 A cold handshake.
Wrapping Up

Everything above boils down to one word: details.

Descriptive writing is about getting readers to truly experience a setting or a character through
their senses.

So when you set out to describe a person or a place in your story, you should first make a
mental list of all the details you could mention to bring it to life (with the items on the list
appealing to a variety of sense).

Why is descriptive writing so important?

When you watch a film, all of the "description" is done for you by a camera and a microphone.
All writers have are words. So you need to use those words to help the reader see and hear
(and smell, taste and touch, too).

You can use them literally ("she wore a red dress"). Or you can write more figuratively. For
example...

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  It's tough to describe the precise look on a character's face when they're in a
really, really foul mood.
 But if you say that their face looked like "the sky before a storm," readers will get the
idea.
Descriptive Writing & Figures of Speech

The most important figures of speech are similes and metaphors. In fact, they lie at the very
heart of great description.

Used well, they can transform an essay. Used badly, or too much, they can kill your essay.

What Are Similes and Metaphors?

Both metaphors and similes compare one thing with another. A simile says that X is "like" or
"as" Y...

 Her skin was as smooth as cream.

 Her hair felt like silk.
 Her eyes were as blue as neon.
With a metaphor, X actually becomes Y. Metaphors are transformative...

 Her skin was made of cream and her hair of the finest silk.
 The man was a beast.
 His whole life had been a roller coaster ride.
Similes and metaphors allow you to describe things that would otherwise be impossible to bring
to life using so few words.

Take "the man was a beast"...

Literally, of course, he is no such thing – he's a human being. What the metaphor implies,
though, is that this man has the qualities of a beast – strength, aggression, lack of intelligence,
and so on.

A metaphor allows you to say all of this, and more, in just four or five words.

Generally speaking, a simile is weaker than a metaphor. "Her hair felt like silk" just isn't as
powerful as "Her hair was silk". But both figures of speech have their place in good descriptive
writing.

When to Use Similes and Metaphors

If a simile is the poor cousin of a metaphor, why not ditch them altogether and use only
metaphors?

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Take a look at this example...

When Mary pulled open the door, she had to screw up her eyes against the glare. The sun
dazzled off the snowy roof tops like they were mirrors, and it was thirty seconds before she
could see clearly. The snow on the driveway was untouched by human footsteps, and Mary felt
like a pioneer as she trudged towards the front gate. Overnight, while she had slept, the world
had turned into a fairy tale.
There are three figures of speech here. Two are similes ("like they were mirrors", "like a
pioneer") and one's a metaphor ("the world had turned into a fairy tale").

Now, the similes could easily have been written as metaphors with a little reworking...

 The snowy roof tops were mirrors angled to the dazzling light of the sun, and it was thirty
seconds before she could see clearly.
 The snow on the driveway was untouched by human footsteps, and Mary became a
pioneer as she trudged towards the front gate.
But it would have been too much.

The climax of this paragraph is the final metaphor, in which the world isn't merely like a fairy
tale, but actually is one.

For this final image to carry maximum weight, everything must build towards it without
overshadowing it, and that's why it's best to keep the two earlier figures of speech – the two
similes – as "low key" as possible.

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Four Rules for Using Similes and Metaphors

1. Less is definitely more.

Similes and metaphors are like the finishes touches in a room. Used well, they beautify a
passage in a novel. Used too often, they make it look unnatural.

2. Avoid the commonplace.

What's wrong with these examples?...

 He drank like a fish.

 She had the heart of a lion.
 The town was as dead as a dodo.
Use original and interesting figures of speech and readers will sit up and take notice.

3. Don't use two similes together.

Using too many similes in general is not recommended, but using one right after the other is a
definite no-no. It simply doesn't work, as these examples show...

 She had skin like cream, hair like silk, and eyes like green marbles.
 He was as fearless as a lion and as fast as a cheetah.
 Frank stood on the edge of the diving board like a prisoner on the gallows. The short
drop to the pool looked as daunting as the Grand Canyon.
4. Don't mix metaphors.

This is virtually the same point as above, although the problem is a subtler one. Take a look at
this...

Norman's mind was a machine. He could waltz through cryptic crosswords in mere minutes.
The trouble here is that the message is confused. First, Norman's intelligence is compared to a
clever and efficient machine. Next, his speed at crosswords is compared to the speed and grace
of a dance.

If you don't want the reader to say "Huh?" you must always "follow metaphors through" once
you've introduced them. Like this...

Norman's mind was a machine. He could process cryptic crosswords in mere minutes.
Other Figures of Speech

a. Personification

This is where you take an inanimate object and animate it – that is, give it human qualities. To
give you the idea, here are a few examples:

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Fred loved his Alfa Romeo but the car didn't always love Fred. It chose the worst days possible
to fall sick on him and refuse to move a muscle.

Mary waded out into the sea but was shoved back to the shore by a great bully of a wave.

On stormy nights, the jagged rocks chewed up many an unsuspecting fishing boat and spat
them out in splinters.

Personification is an excellent way to take a flat description and transform it into something far
more dynamic.

b. Hyperbole

This is deliberate exaggeration, often for comic effect. There's a great example of it in Martin
Amis's Money that has stayed with me for years. He describes the difficulty of crossing the
street in Los Angeles like so...

The only way to get across the road is to be born there.

That may make you smile or not. But there's no doubting that it's a very concise way of painting
a picture in the readers' minds.

c. Onomatopoeia

These are words which sound like the actions they describe. Batman is full of them...

 Bang!
 Crash!
 Kerpow!
However, if you don't want a scene in your novel to sound like a sequence from Batman, use
onomatopoeias more subtly...

John was hopeless at golf. The ball rarely ended up where he had intended to hit it, but he loved
the good thwack of the driver sending it on its misguided way.

Emily loved the sound of her son's pony clip-clopping down the lane.

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