Writing Assignment: Descriptive Essay
- Laura Tichy-Smith
- Jul 3, 2017
- 14 min read
Due dates for this assignment
Post your initial draft plus video recording to the Essay Discussion Board by Sept. 4 at 11:59 p.m.
The class will provide peer feedback for revising the drafts on the Discussion Board. Your discussion posts are due by Sept. 6 at 11:59 p.m.
Use the feedback you received during the discussion week to revise your assignment, and then submit your finished assignment as a Microsoft Word document to the assignment dropbox by Sept. 10 at 11:59 p.m.
Be certain to read the grading rubric at the end of this assignment before you submit your assignment.
Writing essays: The basics
During the first week of class, you did a little informal writing in the form of introducing yourself to your classmates on the discussion board. This week you will do the first formal writing assignment for the class, which will be a short essay. So that you can concentrate upon practicing writing, the essay will be based upon personal experience so that you will not have to worry about doing research and learning how to cite sources properly while you are practicing the mechanics of writing. (We will learn about research and source citation a little later in the semester.)
What are the basic things you need to know about writing this, and future, essays for college? Obviously, you need to write in complete sentences, which means that you will capitalize the first word, conclude with an appropriate punctuation mark, and include both a subject and a verb in the sentence. (Hint: Newspaper-style headlines typically are not sentences because they lack one or more of these elements.) Although this should go without saying, emojis, hashtags, and other elements from texting or social media posting are not used in the professional genres of college or workplace writing (to include emails).
You will also need to break the essay into paragraphs. Paragraphs begin with a topic sentence that the other sentences in the paragraph expand upon or explain. The essay will also need a title at the top.
Also, professors provide grading rubrics, which are charts that tell you how the assignment will be graded. In other words, your professors provide you with a handy checklist of exactly what elements they want to see in assignments, so always check the rubric before you begin writing and again before you turn the assignment in.
Beyond these obvious grammatical writing conventions, the overall essay will have an introduction that contains a thesis statement, body paragraphs for development and support of your thesis, and a conclusion. So, what is a thesis statement? At its most basic, it clearly tells the reader what your essay will be about.
In classes where you do research for your topic, the thesis will state an argument or opinion about the topic that you then have to support with the development paragraphs in the body of the essay. For the purposes of the descriptive essay you will write in this assignment, the thesis likely will be simpler. You will be telling the readers who the descriptive essay is about. If you feel ambitious, you might choose to state a thesis that you would have to provide evidence to support, which would be something such as why your mother is the best mother in the entire world. Keep in mind this will be a harder essay to write successfully because a fair number of readers would counter-argue that their mothers are better than your mother.
If the essay format of an introduction with thesis statement, development and support of your thesis, and conclusion sounds confusing to you, here is another way to think about it. Although this example is describing a narrative, it will at least give you an idea of essay structure by comparing it to something you are very familiar with, which is the plot of a movie.
Imagine you are scrolling through a list of movies, and you see an action-adventure movie with an interesting poster and title. You click on it and watch the first few minutes to see if you want to watch the whole thing. So, what are you doing? You are watching the opening to see what the movie is about, or in other words, you are watching the introduction to learn the thesis of the film.
So, pretend for a moment that the opening of the movie shows a hero who has found a treasure map. He is a man of action, but life has left him jaded and cynical. He only cares about riches. Now we know the thesis for the movie: Jaded hero seeks treasure.
The middle of the film will develop how the hero seeks to obtain the treasure. He will need to assemble a team of people with special skills, such as an explosives expert, a rock climber and rappeler, and a sharpshooter to protect the team. Like the hero, these people only care about money. Because the journey will be through a roadless wilderness, the team will have to travel on horses, so he hires a pair of horse wranglers who happen to be brothers. Additionally, the team will need a guide and a translator. As it happens, one of the guides familiar with the wilderness also happens to be bilingual, so he is able to hire one person to do both jobs. The guide/translator also happens to be beautiful, which actually makes the hero feel a little uncomfortable.
As the team travels across the wilderness, the hero also notices that the guide is very kind and considerate. The hero starts to develop feelings for the guide, which makes him even more uncomfortable. This tells the viewers something more about the reasons behind his jaded cynicism, providing further development of the thesis and telling us why he only cares about money.
So, how does the movie turn out? In other words, what is the conclusion? The guide leads the team to the site, they blow their way in with explosives, and begin loading themselves down with treasure. However, the explosion weakened the ancient building, and it begins to cave in. Most of the team tries to take as much treasure as they can carry as they try to escape, except for the brothers, who are concerned for their horses outside, and the guide, who pleas with everybody to run for their lives. As the trio attempts to escape, a falling rock pins the younger brother, and the guide stops to help the older brother try to free him. The hero sees the guide risk her life to help the brothers, and he is moved to drop his load of treasure to help as well. They move the rock, and helping one another up the rope, the four are the only survivors to escape the cave-in because they were not weighted down with gold. The jaded hero's cynicism is now gone, realizing that he has found the only true treasure – human connection. The thesis of the movie – jaded hero seeks treasure – has proven to be a metaphor as he has realized the only thing worth living for is the love and caring people feel for one another. The thesis is proven because only the people who cared more about other people than about gold survived the collapse of the ancient building.
Now that you have a better idea about the elements and structure of an essay, here is an example of a short essay to read. This essay was originally published in the New York Times in 1995, although it is now widely circulated on blogs around the internet (including on the blog linked below, "The Art of Manliness"). As you read the essay, think about the structure of essays that you just learned about. Can you identify the thesis of the essay?
"The Night of Oranges" by Flavius Stan
The title of the essay references oranges, but is that what the essay is really about? Think about how Stan was telling what, on the surface, was a very simple story about waiting in line to buy oranges. However, he was able to use it to illustrate how something that is ordinary to us (oranges) symbolized something extraordinary for himself, his family, and his country.
Is Stan's essay descriptive or narrative? Frankly, it is a little of both. Stan kept events moving along a timeline of the (narrative) story about his experience of buying the sack of oranges while he interjected (descriptive) information about his life and the changes in the political situation in his country. Your descriptive essays need not be this complex, but it is good for you to read an example that makes the most of a few hundred words.
Now that you have learned about the basics of essay writing, you may begin the writing assignment listed below.
Assignment: Write a Descriptive Essay about an influential person in your life.
STEP 1:
Take a few minutes to note the names of 5-10 people who have been influential in your life.
Stop and write this note right now.
Once you have finished writing this note, do step 2 of the lesson.
STEP 2:
Now that you have your notes, go someplace quiet for a few minutes to do this exercise. This writer's meditation will probably take you about 20-25 minutes to do, including writing the list you will create based upon the meditation.
Take something with you on which to write your list. When you write during this exercise, just write a list. Do not try to think up an introduction or even write finished sentences for this exercise. Just write down a list of quick answers to what you sense as you do this writer's meditation. If you have trouble getting answers to the questions I ask during the meditation, you might have to try this exercise again and choose a different topic from your notes to write about.
I encourage you to try closing your eyes after reading the meditation questions so you can go into the scene and then start writing once you have envisioned the scene. Try to imagine with all of your senses. However, if it works better for you to read a couple of the questions and then stop to write every couple of minutes, rather than trying to remember everything you imagined during the meditation, then do it the way that works for you. You may have to experiment a little to find your best method.
Extra help: If it would help you to have the transcript translated into another language, copy and paste the written transcript into a translating program, such as Google Translate, but be aware that the translation will not be exact. Use options to make the meditation work for you.
"Writer's Meditation for the Descriptive Essay"
Pick someone from your list whom you want to write about today.
Have you chosen someone from your family or someone from outside of your family?
Have you chosen someone you haven't seen in a while or someone you see every day?
Have you chosen someone younger or older than yourself?
Imagine this person in a place.
Is it inside or outside?
Now focus on the person's face, eyes, nose, and mouth.
How old is the person in this image you have?
Now look at the hair and ears.
Let your "eyes" travel down the body.
Is the person slender or heavy?
Look at the arms, hands, legs, and feet.
What is the person wearing?
Now, pull back and look at the surroundings.
What is around the person?
What do you see?
Look to the distance, and what do you see there?
Look up – do you see a ceiling or the sky?
What does it look like – sun, clouds, or stars if you are outside, or ceiling color, texture, and lighting if you are inside?
Look down – do you see the floor or ground?
What sort of covering do you see – carpet, tile, grass, gravel, or dirt?
What are the sounds at this place?
Is the person speaking?
What does the person say?
What other sounds are there in the environment?
Do you hear animals, people, traffic, insects, fans, air-conditioning, other mechanical humming, or weather such as wind, rain, etc.?
How about any smells or aromas?
Do you smell anything?
If so, what do you smell?
Is there anything to taste in this scene?
If so, what is the flavor of the thing or things?
Is there anything to touch in the scene?
How does it feel?
Do you feel any emotions about this scene?
Now, is the person alone or are there other people there?
What is the person (or people) doing in the scene?
And here is an important question:
Are you there, or not there?
Why are you there, or if you are not there, why not?
If you are there, what are you doing in the scene?
Now, close your eyes, breathe, and try to enter the scene for a few minutes.
Next, come back from the scene, open your eyes, and start writing your list. You can refer to the written transcript with all of the questions in this meditation in order to help you remember the details, if you wish. It will probably take you 15-20 minutes to write the list of details. Once you have finished that list, do step 3 of this lesson.
STEP 3:
Before you start writing, read the following short handout from Purdue University's OWL:
"Descriptive Essays"
Next, read the first six paragraphs on the web page below that provides an example of a descriptive essay. (You will read the paragraph in italics at the beginning that explains how the essay came to be written and then read the first five paragraphs of the actual essay, stopping at the enlarged "pull" quote – see the screenshot below the link so that you know where you may stop reading.)
The example is the famous essay "Frank Sinatra Has a Cold" by Gay Talese that was published in Esquire magazine in 1966 and is now posted on the magazine's website in a collection of the most popular articles from its publication history. I am only asking you to read the opening of it because the complete essay is about 35 pages long. (If you like the opening, feel free to read the entire essay on your own sometime.)
Read the web page until you get to the enlarged "pull" quote, shown on this screen shot I took of the article on Esquire magazine's website so that you could see where to stop reading:
STEP 4:
Your descriptive essay assignment is to use the list from the writer's meditation to help you write a descriptive portrait of this person who was so influential in your life. You may need to use some narrative (storytelling) elements in order to create the portrait because you will be showing the person (and that may include showing them doing something), but try to focus more on describing the person and the scene rather than conveying the events of a story.
Make the portrait vivid, alive, active, and compelling. Make the portrait more like a movie than a photograph or painting. It should be more like a color movie than a black-and-white movie. You should make the portrait more like a 3-D movie than a sculpture in a museum. If you think more in sound than vision, you should make the portrait more like a symphony than a guitar solo.
For the initial draft that you will post for classmate discussion, try to write about 350 words. Your final version will need to be 500 words, but you will get the opportunity to add to it once you receive feedback from your peers. Please make the draft as finished-looking as you can, by writing in complete sentences, breaking the text into paragraphs, and, of course, proofreading it before you post it for your classmates to read on next week's discussion board. Do everything you can to make it easy to read so that we can focus on helping you refine how you describe the scene, rather than having us be distracted by lack of punctuation and grammatical errors. Remember, just because it is a draft does not mean that it should be rough to read. Give your piece a compelling title, and write the word count (excluding title) at the end.
Put the influential person at the center of your essay, but remember, with only a few hundred words, you will just be giving us a glimpse of this person at a particular moment in time. You do not have space to write the person's full biography and capture everything about this person. Just give us enough so that we get the flavor of the person. Think about the bits of information we were given in the opening of the Frank Sinatra portrait essay that you just read. Talese gave us a glimpse of Sinatra on a specific evening when this famous singer was in a particular mood. The author did not try to give the man's full biography but instead showed fans an intimate portrait of Sinatra they would not have otherwise have had a chance to see and allowed fans to learn things about the singer they never otherwise would have known.
Show us the person rather than telling us about the person. Again, this is a portrait, not a biography. There may or may not be dialog in the essay. It depends on whether – or not – you deem it necessary to show the person (or perhaps multiple people) speaking in order to create the portrait. Also, try to make us understand – by showing rather than telling – why this person is influential in your life.
What do I mean by the phrase from journalism of, "Show, don't tell"? Here is an example of how NOT to write about the person. (This is an example of "telling" rather than "showing.")
"My mom was born in 1960. She is a really great mother who is so caring and takes good care of me when I'm sick."
Here is an example of how you should try to write the portrait, which uses the technique of "showing."
"Mom bends over me as I shiver with fever, wiping my brow. As she leans forward to slip a fresh pillow behind me to replace the one now soaked with my sweat, her dark hair, streaked with a few gray strands, tumbles forward."
In which example is Mom really shown as being "there"? Are we able to get a sense of her age in the second example without being told when she was born? In the second example, do we need to be told she is caring and takes good care of you when you are sick? We can see these things in the second example without having to be told, can't we, because we are shown a vivid description of the scene? How many sensory details does the second example include (things you can see, feel, etc.)? Now, how many sensory details does the first example include?
Also notice the difference in verbs between the two examples. In the "telling" example, many of the verbs are versions of "to be." In other words, they are passive, linking verbs such as "is" and "was." In the "showing" example, the verbs are all active verbs that depict an action you can imagine seeing.
Also, try to use active verbs to convey the sense of activity in sentences that describe actions. Compare these examples:
"My dog was lost." (Passive verb construction)
"My dog dug a hole under the fence and escaped." (Active verb construction)
Do you see how the active verbs tell the story vividly, provide much more information for the narrative, and help the story keep moving? In the first example with the passive verb "was," the readers do not know how or why your dog became lost. In the second example, we know what happened, and we understand not only that your dog is lost but also why.
While it would be nearly impossible to write without using a linking "is" or "was" at some point, I suggest highlighting every time you use the words "is," "are," "was" or "were" in your draft. Then examine those passages to see if you could rewrite them with active verbs.
Try to write the portrait using present tense verbs, as if it were happening right now in front of the readers, rather than placing the scene of the portrait in the past. Perhaps the example describing mother taking care of "you" is an event that took place when "you" were 10 years old, but notice how it is written with present tense verbs as if it were happening right now. This helps the readers feel as if the event they are reading about is happening right in front of them and helps with "showing" the event.
(If you need another example of writing in the present tense, go back and look at the transcript I wrote of Taylor Mali's proofreading video. Even though the video was recorded in 2005, I wrote the transcript as if the event were taking place that moment because people who are viewing the video are viewing it in the present moment. In other words, I wrote, "Mali says," instead of, "Mali said," and, "The audience laughs," rather than, "The audience laughed.")
Once you have written your initial draft and proofread it, you will record a video reading of the draft that you will post on the discussion board along with your written draft. The simplest way to do this is to use your Smartphone or computer to record yourself reading the draft. However, if for some reason you do not wish to appear on camera, you are permitted to record a friend reading the draft for you (have the person identify themselves and say that they are reading for you). Or, you may use one of many options available on the internet or your home computer to create a computer-generated video with a computer voice reading the essay for you.
Descriptive Essay Grading Rubric
Total Points Possible: 100.0
(To give credit where credit is due, I adapted this assignment from Dr. James Langlass at Florida SouthWestern State College, where he teaches a version of it in his Freshman Composition I classes. Dr. Langlass is an influential person in my life because he was the one who influenced me to become an English instructor. Work cited: Langlass, James. Personal interview. 31 Aug. 2011.)
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