Descriptive Essay: A Reflection Of A Personal Writing

The main aim of a descriptive essay is to create a ‘portrait’ of something. The descriptive essay may delineate a person, a thing, a place, some memory, emotion, or experience. “Unlike a narrative essay, which reveals meaning through a personal story, the purpose of a descriptive essay is to reveal the meaning of a subject through detailed, sensory observation” (Time4Writing). With the help of meticulous observations and images, it endeavours to recreate a profoundly vivacious experience for the reader. The descriptive essay has a familiar structure: introduction, main body, and conclusion. The introduction sets the tone of the work; it typically should grab the readers’ attention and put forward the essay thesis, that is, to justify the necessity of describing its object. The main body depicts the object of the essay while the conclusion recaps its significance.

First of all, you should identify what you are going to describe and justify why this somebody / something is important – for some special qualities, characteristics, or something else. This should be stated straightforwardly in your introduction – otherwise it is equivocal for the reader why you are describing this object. Then, you should imagine your object as clearly as possible. Spend some time, mentally examining it; jot down words and associations that come to your mind when you are looking at it. While making preparatory notes, you may try the pre-writing technique ‘The Journalist Questions’. When preparing an article, the journalists usually ask the following questions: Who / What? When? Where? Why? How? (University of Kansas). Answer these questions in relation to your object. As Chris Van Allsburg puts it, “At first, I see pictures of a story in my mind. Then creating the story comes from asking questions of myself. I guess you might call it the ‘what if – what then’ approach to writing and