Writing A Descriptive Essay
A Descriptive Essay is used to create a vivid image of a person, place, or thing. It draws on all of the senses, not merely the visual. Its purpose is to enable the reader to share the writer's sensory experience of the subject.
Essay writing purposes center on a point being made, and that point is then supported by specific evidence. The essay usually requires the writer to persuade the reader to agree with him that the essay’s thesis is correct. In all respects, the purposes of essay writing are to inform, to persuade, or to entertain.
This is a descriptive essay, and its purpose is mainly to inform, but it should also include persuasion and needs to engage the reader’s interest (to entertain). The easiest approach to writing a descriptive essay is in the first person – to describe what the writer sees, hears, smells, tastes, and feels. Because the writer has experienced these things, his descriptions can be more vivid than when he describes something that someone else experiences.
That said, it is more difficult to write a descriptive essay from the third person approach – for the writer to seemingly detach herself from the description. The writer does not, however, need to remove her experiences, but rather she should describe her subject differently than she would in a first person essay. In a third person essay, the object becomes literally the subject of the essay. For example, if she were to describe the whiteboard in the classroom, the writer’s sentences could be structured like these:
“The whiteboard came from the factory clean and white, with a smooth, unblemished surface. After many years of use, the board has scratches, pockmarks, dents, and stains that inhibit its effectiveness as a useful tool for classroom study.”
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“First, the audio-visual (A/V) cart includes a shelf for the instructor to store videos, books, and disks. Because the shelf is too shallow, however, it prevents items from remaining organized, so the instructor’s...
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