Use the five senses:
To create descriptions that will stay with your reader and improve your writing skills, you’ll need to learn how to describe the sensory details of all five of your senses.
Description is one of the most basic tools in a writer’s toolkit. You
can’t get very far in a story, a poem, or a narrative essay if you can’t convey what the things you’re describing are like. For the most part, we humans rely on our senses to take in and interpret the world. At the same time, many beginning writers rely only on the sense of sight to describe a scene.
But if you’re only writing with sight, you’re ignoring four of the five senses. Learn From the Best How
to Write With Sight It’s fine to describe how things look. In fact, sense when it comes to descriptive writing. While a photographer might be able to take in an entire scene at once, a writer has to choose what details to focus on and place them in the most effective order. That means you’ll want to be judicious about what details you choose to highlight. The ocean may be blue, bricks may be red, but are these really the details you want to call to the reader’s attention? Writing
Prompt. Stand in front of your house (or apartment, or cabin, or yurt) and create a list of 20 things you notice about it. Write down colors, shapes, details. Be as specific as you can. When you’re done, pick the three or four of the most interesting things you noticed, and use those to write a
Remember, if you’re trying to create a strong visual sense of scene, try highlighting unusual or specific details. Rather than calling attention to the redness of the
brick wall, why not call out the ivy that’s windings its way across the cracked surface of the bricks?
Writing Tip. One good technique to keep in mind is describing things indirectly: To convey the
brightness of the sun, you could say directly that the sun is bright, but you could also describe the way the light from the sun causes the glass windows to shine solid white. Meet One of Your New Instructors How to Write With Taste Taste is often considered the
most difficult sense to write about, but it can also be one of the most
powerful. For one, it’s extremely subjective: ve all may know (or think we know) what a fresh apple tastes like, for instance, but how do you describe that taste? Is it the crispness, the tiny burst of acidity amidst the sweetness? Or is the apple bland because it is not fresh? Another difficulty is finding the right time to deploy taste imagery. As with smell, taste is extremely personal and evocative, so you’ll want to be careful to avoid distracting the reader with excessive descriptions.