Descriptive Essay

More than many other types of essays, descriptive essays strive to create
a deeply involved and vivid experience for the reader. Great descriptive
essays achieve this effect not through facts and statistics but by using
detailed observations and descriptions.

What do you want to describe?

As you get started on your descriptive essay, it's important for you to
identify exactly what you want to describe. Often, a descriptive essay
will focus on portraying one of the following:

 a person
 a place
 a memory
 an experience
 an object

Ultimately, whatever you can perceive or experience can be the focus of

your descriptive writing.

Why are you writing your descriptive essay?

It's a great creative exercise to sit down and simply describe what you
observe. However, when writing a descriptive essay, you often have a
particular reason for writing your description. Getting in touch with this
reason can help you focus your description and imbue your language
with a particular perspective or emotion.

Example: Imagine that you want to write a descriptive essay about your
grandfather. You've chosen to write about your grandfather's physical
appearance and the way that he interacts with people. However, rather
than providing a general description of these aspects, you want to
convey your admiration for his strength and kindness. This is your
reason for writing the descriptive essay. To achieve this, you might
focus one of your paragraphs on describing the roughness of his hands,
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roughness resulting from the labor of his work throughout his life, but
you might also describe how he would hold your hands so gently with
his rough hands when having a conversation with you or when taking a
walk.

How should you write your description?

If there's one thing you should remember as you write your descriptive
essay, it's the famous saying: show don't tell. But what's the difference
between showing and telling?

Consider these two simple examples:

 I grew tired after dinner.

 As I leaned back and rested my head against the top of the
chair, my eyelids began to feel heavy, and the edges of the
empty plate in front of me blurred with the white tablecloth.

The first sentence tells readers that you grew tired after dinner. The
second sentence shows readers that you grew tired. The most effective
descriptive essays are loaded with such showing because they enable
readers to imagine or experience something for themselves.

As you write your descriptive essay, the best way to create a vivid
experience for your readers is to focus on the five senses.

 sight
 sound
 smell
 touch
 taste

When you focus your descriptions on the senses, you provide vivid and
specific details that show your readers rather than tell your readers what
you are describing.

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My Favourite Place

The sun shines. The water glistens in the bright light. The wind swirls around me, unsettling the
hot sand beneath my feet. I run to the ocean, disturbing the calm water as I dive in. The water
surrounds me, engulfing me in its warmth. I am now at peace. For right now, at this moment, I
am one with the water and the salt and the sand, and everything is okay. All my problems are
washed away with the tide. It’s just me and the ocean.

I cannot describe how much the ocean means to me. The wave, the sand, the sun, the water, the
world deep beneath the surface that no human truly understands just connects with me. I grew up
with the ocean; it was on the shores that I took my first steps, learned to swim, and grew familiar
with all the small creatures the dwell near the shore. No, I didn’t entirely grow up on the beach,
though I wish I had. I’ve lived since birth, in the Chicago land area. However, once a year my
family has gathered in a beach house in North Carolina, right on the ocean, for a weeklong
reunion. I treasured those precious seven days I had with my family on the beach, for that is all I
got; seven days of pure happiness, and then I went back to my normal, beach-less life. Don’t get
me wrong; I loved growing up in the city, but something about those weeks at the beach captured
my heart and made me yearn for more.

Many of my best childhood memories are centered on the shores of North Carolina. Surrounded
by all my favorite people and things, there was never a dull moment. Though looking back it
seems like we spent every waking moment on the beach and in the water, we also played games
inside the beach house, or just hung out and talked while sitting on the porch, looking out at a
beautiful beach sunset. My cousins would be too scared to go near the big ones, preferring to
stay near the shore. But as for me, the daredevil, I looked down upon the wimpy waves, wanting
only the big ones that can only be found in deeper water. Once, a big storm hit our beach and all
the strong men went out to try to conquer the ten feet waves. I wanted so much to join them
battle the sea. However, my mother would not let me go in. So instead, my cousins and I stayed
on the porch watching, amazed at how the calm and peaceful ocean of the daytime could turn
into such a monster. But the next morning, the sound of the calm waves crashing on the sandy
shore greeted me as I first opened my eyes to the new day in paradise. The peaceful water I knew
and loved had returned, waiting for me to go back in.

Even the not so great things at the beach will grow on a person. For instance, the fact that sand
gets everywhere may bother some people, but not me. And not just the places you would expect
it to be, it’s everywhere. Even when you try so hard not to touch the sandy ocean floor, it gets in
your swimsuit, the couch, the bed, and the floor. It just seems to follow you in the house, despite
the many rugs feebly attempting the stop the sand at the front door. But while at any beach, you
come to expect it. I not only came to live with sleeping with sand, but I also started to like it. I
never had to leave the beach, even when I was sleeping. There are other down sides to being at
the beach, but none of them bother me anymore. For example, no matter how much sunscreen
you rub into your skin, you always seem to get sunburn somewhere. Or how it doesn’t matter if
you are dripping with bug spray at night, the mosquitoes attack you anyway. But even sunburn
and mosquito bites can’t ruin my trips to the beach. After all, I am at my favorite place in the
world.

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