Two Secrets to Writing an Exciting Description

Reading descriptions can be super boring; you probably skip them when you read older books, especially if they go on and on.

Today’s writers know how to capture your attention and keep the descriptions interesting. What are their secrets? We’ll explore two today.

Senses

First, they use their senses. Here’s a fascinating verse about Jesus that the apostle John writes in the beginning of his first letter:

“That which was from the beginning, which we have heard, which we have seen with our eyes, which we have looked at and our hands have touched—this we proclaim concerning the Word of life” (I John 1:1 NIV)

How many senses from the list below does he depend on to tell us that Jesus is real?

5 Powerful Persuasion Strategies for Your Writers

SHARON’S BLOG

I love to bring you examples of effective writing so your students can use them, and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech to a joint meeting of the U. S. Congress is an excellent example of persuasive writing. He used many powerful strategies in his speech, five of which we’ll delve into today.

Your students will better understand the intricacies of writing when they have the chance to learn from professional examples of published authors and speechmakers, so, to that end, let’s explore the persuasion tactics Netanyahu used.

Below are five powerful persuasion techniques. After the list, you’ll find a family writing prompt that involves one of them.

To read the complete transcript of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s speech, click here. .

A Topic Sentence at the End?

You are familiar with topic sentences, how they come at the beginning of paragraphs and tell readers what the paragraph is all about.

But what if the topic sentence came at the end of the paragraph? And what if that paragraph described something from a story?

Topic sentence at the end

Here’s part of a paragraph from J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit. Notice the topic sentence at the end of the description:

Describe Characters by Their Clothing

HIGH SCHOOL PROMPTS

In a story, clothing can be the author’s way of telling us what kind of character we’re reading about.

What are they wearing?

Judging real people by their clothing might not be too smart, but authors rely on readers to judge characters based on their characters’ clothing.

For instance, someone in a black leather jacket with a skull embroidered on the back and chains hanging from a pants pocket is going to be very different from someone in a light aqua-colored jacket carrying an umbrella with pink flowers on it. We make assumptions of people according to their appearance.

Happy Birthday, Joseph Conrad!

HIGH SCHOOL PROMPTS

Although author Joseph Conrad was born in Poland as Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski, he learned to speak and write in English in his twenties.

The fact that he learned how to write in the English language so late in life makes his command of the language, as seen in his stories, impressive.

Joseph Conrad is famous for his novella Heart of Darkness in which the narrator goes on a voyage to the jungles of Africa in the late 1800s in search of a man named Kurtz.

Below is the narrator’s description of a scene he comes upon. You can tell by the words and items he chooses in this description that what he finds next will not be nice:

When the Frost Is on the Pumpkin: 3 Fun Writers’ Devices

MIDDLE SCHOOL PROMPTS

This is a good time of year to read James Whitcomb Riley’s “When the Frost Is on the Punkin,” which you can read here. It describes the glories of life on the farm during the cool, crisp days of autumn, and the harvest season.

In the poem, you’ll find this phrase: “The husky, rusty russel of the tossels of the corn / And the raspin’ of the tangled leaves as golden as the morn. . .”

Note: Riley misspells “russel” on purpose. The correct spelling is “rustle.” Same with “tossels,” which is supposed to be “tassels.” And, of course “punkin,” which is, you guessed it, “pumpkin.” He’s using a country dialect in his writing.

Riley uses the three wonderful words “husky, rusty russel” to describe the sound of the dried leaves of the corn plant as they rub together in the wind. If you have ever heard those dry leaves or blades rubbing together, you can almost hear the “s” sound in the wind, as though they are whispering to each other.

What are Riley’s secrets to writing so well?

Good Pirate, Bad Pirate

HIGH SCHOOL PROMPTS

Robert Louis Stevenson is the author of Treasure Island, The Black Arrow, Kidnapped, A Child’s Garden of Verses, the deliciously creepy The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde based on a real person, and much more. You can learn more about him here.

Pirate in disguise

In Treasure Island, young Jim Hawkins is warned to be on the lookout for and avoid “the seafaring man with one leg.” Yet when he meets a sailor with one leg named Long John Silver, Hawkins is not troubled. Why?

First, he’s had a letter from his friend the squire claiming that Long John Silver is a war veteran who lost his leg “in his country’s service.” Next, when he meets Silver for himself, Silver seems “clean and pleasant-tempered.” Here is the paragraph where Jim Hawkins meets the truly nasty Long John Silver who, at the moment, doesn’t seem so nasty:

How to Convince an Audience: Opinion versus Persuasion

SHARON’S BLOG

You may be very good at expressing your opinions, especially when you want to change someone’s mind.

What you may not know is that if you truly want to change someone’s mind, you have to stop thinking about your opinion and start thinking about your audience.

This tutorial, with a free infographic to download, will show you very clearly the difference between writing an opinion and writing to persuade an audience.

Opinion versus Persuasion

Writing or expressing an opinion is all about what you like; convincing another person to do something is all about what they need to hear to be persuaded.

Here’s an infographic that shows the difference between writing an opinion and writing to persuade. After the infographic, I’ve included a short writing exercise you can do quickly. My writing class just did it, and they had fun sharing their ideas about alligators, snow leopards, snakes, and so forth.

His Hands Were Bigger Than Shovels: Hyperbole

HIGH SCHOOL PROMPTS

Hyperbole is a lot of fun to read and to write.

But what is it?

Hyperbole (hi PER bo lee) is exaggeration, as in “He was as hefty as a whale” or “Her whining voice so electrified the air that it knocked migrating geese off their course.” To read examples of this figure of speech, click here.

Just so you know, this figure of speech is also called a writer’s device and a literary device. And, just so you also know, “writer’s device” and “literary device” mean the same thing. The first is from the writer’s perspective; the latter is from the perspective of a student studying literature.

Here’s an example of hyperbole from Lee Child’s Personal in which he describes one of the bad guys:

Write a Story from an Animal’s Perspective

HIGH SCHOOL PROMPTS

How do you write a story about Alaska before people arrived? You make animals the main characters, which is exactly what James A. Michener does in Alaska.

Michener creates Matriarch, a mammoth that is old enough to be the grandmother of many other mammoths. Through her eyes, we see the landscape and experience the early troubles of the area now known as Alaska.