Larbi Ben M’Hidi University, Oum El Bouaghi Department of English CPE/G6 Lecturer: Ms Souaad ZERROUKI April 2023 Descriptive Essays When writing a description essay, use words to create a vivid impression of a subject. Use details that appeal to the five senses: sight, smell, hearing, taste, and touch. You want your readers to be able to imagine all that you are describing. The Thesis Statement In a description essay, the thesis statement includes what you are describing and makes a point about the topic. Example Saint Paul’s Cathedral is striking on the outside and remarkable on the inside. Topic Controlling Idea The Supporting Ideas When developing a description essay, make sure it gives a dominant impression. The dominant impression is the overall feeling that you wish to convey. For example, the essay could convey an impression of tension, joy, nervousness, or anger. You can place the details of a description essay in space order, time order, or emphatic order. The order depends on the topic of your essay. For example, if you describe a place, use space order, and if you describe a difficult moment, perhaps use time order. Using Figurative Devices When writing a description essay, you can use figurative devices such as simile, metaphor, or personification. These devices use comparisons and images to add vivid details to your writing. A simile is a comparison using like or as. - My son’s constant whining felt like a jackhammer on my skull. A metaphor is a comparison that does not use like or as. - Jealousy . . . is the green-eyed monster . . . —William Shakespeare, Othello - The mind is a battlefield. Personification is the act of attributing human qualities to an inanimate object or animal. - The wind kicked the leaves. —Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., “Next Door” - The sauce hissed on the stove. 1 Larbi Ben M’Hidi University, Oum El Bouaghi Department of English CPE/G6 Lecturer: Ms Souaad ZERROUKI April 2023 Model Descriptive Essay Scents go straight to the brain where they wake up memories and feelings. A whiff of some scent wanders idly up the nostrils, then races off to work in the mind’s twisty passages. The mind is a busier place than anyone knows. People usually consider only the extremes of the scent scale: a wonderful perfume or a really evil stench. However, it is the ordinary aromas of everyday places that bring back fragile memories of long ago and forgotten feelings about the recent past. Offices used to have distinct smells, for instance. Workplaces today just smell like whatever is whooshing through the ventilation system but not the places where yesterday’s fathers went every day. Those pale green or grey offices of the 1940s and 1950s with their dark wood moldings had a whole menu of smells. There were layers of aromas that surely seeped into the people who toiled there—tired cigarette smoke, pricky twinges of hot wiring, the carbon-y traces of typewriter and elevator oil, and the odd light waft of piney aftershave. Elementary schools probably still smell the way they always did. The chattering hallways are full of the warm familiar smell of the kids’ hair and breath, soft and kind to the nose as a pet’s fur. In winter, the hot breath of school furnaces ripens half-sour aromas of damp boots, sodden snowsuits, and sweet blackening bananas hiding in lockers. These days, however, classrooms may be missing one traditional ingredient in the ‘‘ school aroma’’ recipe : the flat, nose-choking, dusty smell of chalk ; it has been replaced by the solvent stink of whiteboard marker. Corner stores have always smelled like excitement and dreams to children and to most adults, too, if they admit it. Take a trip to the corner convenience store. Inhaling brings back dreamy scents and memories—the soapy, powdery smells of baby-pink bubblegum squares, the heavy smell of chocolate, and even the strangely medicinal breath of the ice-cream cooler. Adults’ and children’s noses alike twitch at the chemical hint of printer’s ink from tied bundles of magazines and comics 2 Larbi Ben M’Hidi University, Oum El Bouaghi Department of English CPE/G6 Lecturer: Ms Souaad ZERROUKI April 2023 waiting to be shelved, but only the grown-ups remember the coarse stink of sulphur rising every May from flame-red-tissue paper packs of firecrackers. So every day’s scents are a feast for the mind and memory. The past and present jostle for attention right under our noses. Maybe it is time to wake up and inhale the aromas of the coffee, the classroom, and that fresh basket of clean laundry waiting on the stairs. Homework Write an essay describing a building or a person that impressed you. 3
