Writing effective descriptions

“Description begins in the writer’s imagination, but should finish in the reader’s.”

- Stephen King

Descriptive writing is a powerful tool that adds life and depth to your writing. Effective descriptions breathe life into your ideas and put the reader in the scene where those ideas live. If I want to write about my experience living in Japan, the best way I can relate that to another person is through description: the smell of the food, the sounds of the city, the beauty of the landscape.

Show don’t tell

This is one of the most important things to remember when writing descriptions. Don’t tell your reader what it was like, show them. Paint a picture to help them feel what you want them to feel and see what you want them to see.

Telling: I walked into the dark, creepy basement.

Showing: Stepping down into the basement, I reached out my hands to guide me through the dark, and I tried to ignore the mysterious smells creeping up my nose.

A basement is just a room. A room isn’t inherently creepy. It’s the details, the dark, the smells, the weird noises, that make it creepy. Telling the reader something is creepy doesn’t make them feel it. Using descriptive language to highlight the creepy details does.

Deliberate word choice

Does “big” mean the same thing as “massive”? Does “run” mean the same thing as “dash”? Not exactly. Deliberate word choice can go a long way towards making your descriptions more vivid (Bachman, Barnhart, & Krenzke, 1997, p. 53-54).

Plain word choice: Shannon ran and picked up her son just before a car drove by. Vivid word choice: Shannon dashed across the yard, grabbing her son away from the street just before a car raced by.

Less is more

The best descriptions are simple and to the point. You want to sprinkle your descriptions throughout your writing so that they complement the message you’re trying to convey, not bury it. Long, meandering descriptions derail the reader’s focus so they’re only thinking about what you’re describing, not what you’re writing about (Murdick, 2011, p. 115-116).

Examples

One of the best ways to learn any skill is to watch people who do it well. Reading is just as important to developing your writing skills as actually writing. Here are a few examples of effective use of descriptive language.

"The Snows of Kilimanjaro” Ernest Hemingway

Hemingway is famous for his straight-to-the-point writing style. Notice how, without much flowery language, he is able to paint a clear picture of the scene where the story is taking place. He does this by not describing everything. He describes the significant details, and he lets the reader fill in the blanks in their mind.

"’I Lost Literally Everything’: Historic Town Cleans Up After Catastrophic Flooding” Debbie Elliot

A news story like this is often just a collection of facts: number people displaced, hurt, or killed; the amount of property damage; inches of rain; etc. The problem with this is, when a hurricane hits the U.S., every news outlet in the country is going to be writing that exact story. Instead, Elliot zoomed in on the effects of the storm on individuals, and in doing so, she made the story about people instead of a storm.

"American Weirdness: Observations From an Expat” Rachel Donadio

This is a story completely about details. Instead of talking about the overarching cultural differences between France and the U.S., Donadio focuses on the little things. This is effective because it’s how people experience the world. Although this piece was written for a major news organization, it could easily be submitted for a school assignment about an experience you had while traveling.

References

Bachman, L., Barnhart, D., & Krenzke, L. (Eds.). (1997). Write for college. Wilmington, MA: Great Source Education Group.

Donadio, R. (2018, Sep. 18). American weirdness: Observations from an expat. The Atlantic. Retrieved from https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2018/09/expat-america- europe/570580/

Elliot, D. (2018, Sep. 17). ‘I lost literally everything’: Historic town cleans up after catastrophic flooding. NPR. Retrieved from https://www.npr.org/2018/09/17/648671344/historic-n-c-town-deals-with- flooding-after-florence-blows-through

Hemingway, Ernest. (1938). The snows of Kilimanjaro. University of Virginia. Retrieved from http://xroads.virginia.edu/~drbr/heming.html’

King, Stephen. (2002). On writing: A memoir of the craft. New York, NY: Pocket Books. Murdick, W. (2011). A student guide to college composition (2nd ed.). Fremont, CA: Jane Publishing Company.

Contributor: Tony DeFilippo