Difficulties of Writing a Descriptive Essay

Descriptive writing is probably the least academic kind of assignment you are going to get during your writing classes. You don’t have to do any research, you don’t have to rifle through sources, you don’t have to prove your point – you simply have to describe something. Or, probably, not simply – the task of writing a descriptive essay is much less trivial than many students tend to believe. But still – within the given topic (if you are given one) you have almost complete freedom – you may approach this description from any direction, write in any style, build any connections between the paragraphs – as long as the whole actually looks good. Sometimes this freedom may be confusing – tutors rarely pay much attention to teaching their students how to write these kinds of assignments, and you may find yourself at a loss when given a task of this kind. Let’s hope that this little article will be of some help.

A Descriptive Essay about Lonely Life

First of all you should understand that descriptive writing isn’t limited to the physical worlds. In other words, you can describe not only a landscape, but also your feelings on seeing it, an abstract concept, an emotion, a situation and so on. To be asked, for example, to write about loneliness is not an unusual thing. The important thing is that it should be more or less static, otherwise it drifts to the domain of narrative writing. It will help to read and study a descriptive essay example or two before setting about to write something on your own – although practice is, as usual, the best teacher, it won’t help you much if what you practice is wrong to begin with. Another important aspect of descriptive writing is that when all is said and done, the reader should get a very clear and definite impression of what you were writing about. It means that although you have a lot of freedom when dealing with this kind of assignment, you should make sure you don’t wander off the topic. Verbosity isn’t encouraged either – some people may believe that wordiness makes their prose more ‘classic’, but the truth is that it simply makes it longer. Taking into account the specified word limit, brevity is your best friend.

Using a Descriptive Essay Example

Speaking about examples, make sure you get yours from a legitimate source. There are too many websites that offer pretty random texts to those who come looking for examples. Sometimes you may be given a dozen examples, none of which has anything to do with the topic you need. Getting back to an essay about lonely life, there are a lot of things you may base such a piece of writing on. Probably, you have a personal experience of loneliness? Or you know a person who lives a very secluded life? Or you simply can imagine what it must feel like and write down your take on this feeling? The variants are innumerable. You only have to choose.