5 Model Descriptive Paragraphs.doc 5r5j25

5 Model Descriptive Paragraphs Examples of Descriptive Writing Getty Images

By Richard Nordquist The purpose of descriptive writingis to make our readers see, feel, and hear what we have seen, felt, and heard. Whether we're describing a person, a place, or a thing, our aim is to reveal a subject through vivid and carefully selected details. Each of the five paragraphs below responds, in its own way, to the guidelines in How to Write a Descriptive Paragraph. The writers (three of them students, two of them professional authors) have selected a belonging or a place that holds special meaning to them, identified that subject in a clear topic sentence, and then described it in detail while explaining its personal significance. In the following paragraph, observe how the writer moves clearly from a description of the head of the clown (in sentences two, three, and four), to the body (sentences five, six, seven, and eight), to the unicycle underneath (sentence nine). Notice also how the concluding sentence helps to tie the paragraph together by emphasizing the personal value of this gift.

1) A Friendly Clown On one corner of my dresser sits a smiling toy clown on a tiny unicycle--a gift I received last Christmas from a close friend. The clown's short yellow hair, made of yarn, covers its ears but is parted

above the eyes. The blue eyes are outlined in black with thin, dark lashes flowing from the brows. It has cherry-red cheeks, nose, and lips, and its broad grin disappears into the wide, white ruffle around its neck. The clown wears a fluffy, two-tone nylon costume. The left side of the outfit is light blue, and the right side is red. The two colors merge in a dark line that runs down the center of the small outfit. Ads Free English Lessons www.deepenglish.com/LearnEnglish Speak Fluent English. Be Confident. Get Our Free Email Course. 7 Days. Surrounding its ankles and disguising its long black shoes are big pink bows. The white spokes on the wheels of the unicycle gather in the center and expand to the black tire so that the wheel somewhat resembles the inner half of a grapefruit. The clown and unicycle together stand about a foot high. As a cherished gift from my good friend Tran, this colorful figure greets me with a smile every time I enter my room. Here's the final version of the descriptive paragraph that appears in the exercise Practice in ing a Topic Sentence with Specific Details. Compare this version with the earlier one to see which descriptions have been retained, what information has been omitted, and how sentences have been reworded and rearranged.

2) The Blond Guitar by Jeremy Burden My most valuable possession is an old, slightly warped blond guitar-the first instrument I taught myself how to play. It's nothing fancy, just a Madeira folk guitar, all scuffed and scratched and finger-printed. At the top is a bramble of copper-wound strings, each one hooked through the eye of a silver tuning key. The strings are stretched down

a long, slim neck, its frets tarnished, the wood worn by years of fingers pressing chords and picking notes. The body of the Madeira is shaped like an enormous yellow pear, one that was slightly damaged in shipping. The blond wood has been chipped and gouged to gray, particularly where the pick guard fell off years ago. No, it's not a beautiful instrument, but it still lets me make music, and for that I will always treasure it. In the next descriptive paragraph, the student writer focuses less on the physical appearance of her pet than on the cat's habits and actions.

3) Gregory by Barbara Carter Gregory is my beautiful gray Persian cat. He walks with pride and grace, performing a dance of disdain as he slowly lifts and lowers each paw with the delicacy of a ballet dancer. His pride, however, does not extend to his appearance, for he spends most of his time indoors watching television and growing fat. He enjoys TV commercials, especially those for Meow Mix and 9 Lives. His familiarity with cat food commercials has led him to reject generic brands of cat food in favor of only the most expensive brands. Gregory is as finicky about visitors as he is about what he eats, befriending some and repelling others. He may snuggle up against your ankle, begging to be petted, or he may imitate a skunk and stain your favorite tros. Gregory does not do this to establish his territory, as many cat experts think, but to humiliate me because he is jealous of my friends. After my guests have fled, I look at the old fleabag snoozing and smiling to himself in front of the television set, and I have to forgive him for his obnoxious, but endearing, habits.

The following paragraph opens the third chapter of Maxine Hong Kingston'sThe Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood Among Ghosts (Knopf, 1976), a lyrical of a Chinese-American girl growing up in California. Notice how Kingston integrates informative and descriptive details in this of "the metal tube" that holds her mother's diploma from medical school.

4) The Magic Metal Tube by Maxine Hong Kingston Once in a long while, four times so far for me, my mother brings out the metal tube that holds her medical diploma. On the tube are gold circles crossed with seven red lines each--"joy" ideographs in abstract. There are also little flowers that look like gears for a gold machine. According to the scraps of labels with Chinese and American addresses, stamps, and postmarks, the family airmailed the can from Hong Kong in 1950. It got crushed in the middle, and whoever tried to peel the labels off stopped because the red and gold paint come off too, leaving silver scratches that rust. Somebody tried to pry the end off before discovering that the tube falls apart. When I open it, the smell of China flies out, a thousand-year-old bat flying heavy-headed out of the Chinese caverns where bats are as white as dust, a smell that comes from long ago, far back in the brain. In this paragraph (originally published in Washington Post Book World and reprinted in Faith of a Writer: Life, Craft, Art [HarperCollins, 2003]), Joyce Carol Oates affectionately describes the "single-room schoolhouse" she attended from first through fifth grades. Notice how she appeals to our sense of smell before moving on to describe the layout and contents of the room.

5) Inside District School #7, Niagara County, New York by Joyce Carol Oates

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Inside, the school smelled smartly of varnish and wood smoke from the potbellied stove. On gloomy days, not unknown in upstate New York in this region south of Lake Ontario and east of Lake Erie, the windows emitted a vague, gauzy light, not much reinforced by ceiling lights. We squinted at the blackboard, that seemed far away since it was on a small platform, where Mrs. Dietz's desk was also positioned, at the front, left of the room. We sat in rows of seats, smallest at the front, largest at the rear, attached at their bases by metal runners, like a toboggan; the wood of these desks seemed beautiful to me, smooth and of the red-burnished hue of horse chestnuts. The floor was bare wooden planks. An American flag hung limply at the far left of the blackboard and above the blackboard, running across the front of the room, designed to draw our eyes to it avidly, worshipfully, were paper squares showing that beautifully shaped script known as Parker Penmanship.

How to Write a Descriptive Paragraph Ads "You see, but you do not observe. The distinction is clear." (Sherlock Holmes in "A Scandal in Bohemia" by Arthur Conan Doyle). Statue of Sherlock Holmes outside the Baker Street underground station in London

By Richard Nordquist Look! Put simply, that's the watchword of this project and the motto of all good writers: pay attention to the details and show the reader what you mean. Specific details create

word pictures that can make writing more interesting and easier to understand. In this project, you will practice organizing those specific details into an effective descriptiveparagraph. Guided by the steps below, you will begin by selecting one of your belongings and then drafting a list of details that describe it. Ads Next, you will put these details into sentences and organize the sentences into a paragraph. Finally, you will revise the paragraph to make sure that it is unified and clearly organized. For good examples of the finished product, see Model Descriptive Paragraphs.

1) Find and Explore a Topic Before you can write an effective descriptive paragraph, you need to do two things: 

find a good topic;

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study the topic carefully (a strategy that we callprobing). For guidelines and examples, visitDiscovery Strategy: Probing Your Topic.

2) Draft a Descriptive Paragraph

Once you have settled on a topic for your descriptive paragraph and collected some details, you're ready to assemble those details in a rough draft that begins with a topic sentence. You will find a common model for organizing a description at Draft a Descriptive Paragraph.

3) Revise a Descriptive Paragraph Now you will revise your descriptive paragraph, concentrating on its organization. That is, you will check to see that your

sentences follow a clear and logical order, each detail related to the one that came before and leading to the one that follows. These two exercises will give you practice in revising effectively: 

Practice in ing a Topic Sentence with Specific Details

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Practice in Organizing a Descriptive Paragraph

4) Revise, Edit, and Proofread You're almost done. It's now time to invite someone else (a classmate, for example, or your instructor) to read your descriptive paragraph and suggest ways to improve it. Taking your reader's comments into consideration, revise the paragraph one last time, using as a guide this Revision Checklist for a Descriptive Paragraph. For examples of the finished product, see Model Descriptive Paragraphs.

1) The Laundry Room The windows at either end of the laundry room were open, but no breeze washed through to carry off the stale odors of fabric softener, detergent, and bleach. In the small ponds of soapy water that stained the concrete floor were stray balls of multicolored lint and fuzz. Along the left wall of the room stood ten rasping dryers, their round windows offering glimpses of jumping socks, underwear, and fatigues. Down the center of the room were a dozen washing machines, set back to back in two rows. Some were chugging like steamboats; others were whining and whistling and dribbling suds. Two stood forlorn and empty, their lids flung open, with crudely drawn signs that said "Broke!" A long shelf partially covered in blue paper ran the length of the wall, interrupted only by a locked door. Alone, at the far end of the shelf, sat one empty laundry basket and an

open box of Tide. Above the shelf at the other end was a small bulletin board decorated with yellowed business cards and torn slips of paper: scrawled requests for rides, reward offers for lost dogs, and phone numbers without names or explanations. Ads Tokyo Apartments www.tokyoapartments.jp All your housing needs made easy. Find short & long-term apartments Afip: Cambio Dólar igdigital.com/Futuro-Dolar Aprenda como hacer para Cambiar Dólares sin autorización de la AFIP On and on the machines hummed and wheezed, gurgled and gushed, washed, rinsed, and spun.

2) Mabel's Lunch* by Wright Morris Mabel's Lunch stood along one wall of a wide room, once a pool hall, with the empty cue racks along the back side. Beneath the racks were wire-back chairs, one of them piled with magazines, and between every third or fourth chair a brass spittoon. Near the center of the room, revolving slowly as if the idle air was water, a large propeller fan suspended from the pressed tin ceiling. It made a humming sound, like a telephone pole, or an idle, throbbing locomotive, and although the switch cord vibrated it was cluttered with flies. At the back of the room, on the lunch side, an oblong square was cut in the wall and a large woman with a soft, round face peered through at us. After

wiping her hands, she placed her heavy arms, as if they tired her, on the shelf. * Adapted from a paragraph in The World in the Attic, by Wright Morris (Scribner's, 1949).

3) Subway Station* by Gilbert Highet Standing in the subway station, I began to appreciate the place--almost to enjoy it. First of all, I looked at the lighting: a row of meager light bulbs, unscreened, yellow, and coated with filth, stretched toward the black mouth of the tunnel, as though it were a bolt hole in an abandoned coal mine. Then I lingered, with zest, on the walls and ceilings: lavatory tiles which had been white about fifty years ago, and were now encrusted with soot, coated with the remains of a dirty liquid which might be either atmospheric humidity mingled with smog or the result of a perfunctory attempt to clean them with cold water; and, above them, gloomy vaulting from which dingy paint was peeling off like scabs from an old wound, sick black paint leaving a leprous white undersurface. Beneath my feet, the floor a nauseating dark brown with black stains upon it which might be stale oil or dry chewing gum or some worse defilement: it looked like the hallway of a condemned slum building. Then my eye traveled to the tracks, where two lines of glittering steel--the only positively clean objects in the whole place--ran out of darkness into darkness above an unspeakable mass of congealed oil, puddles of dubious liquid, and a mishmash of old cigarette packets, mutilated and filthy newspapers, and the debris that filtered down from the street above through a barred grating in the roof.

* Adapted from a paragraph in Talents and Geniuses, by Gilbert Highet (Oxford University Press, 1957).

4) The Kitchen* by Alfred Kazin The kitchen held our lives together. My mother worked in it all day long, we ate in it almost all meals except the over seder, I did my homework and first writing at the kitchen table, and in winter I often had a bed made up for me on three kitchen chairs near the stove. On the wall just over the table hung a long horizontal mirror that sloped to a ship's prow at each end and was lined in cherry wood. It took up the whole wall, and drew every object in the kitchen to itself. The walls were a fiercely stippled whitewash, so often rewhitened by my father in slack seasons that the paint looked as if it had been squeezed and cracked into the walls. A large electric bulb hung down the center of the kitchen at the end of a chain that had been hooked into the ceiling; the old gas ring and key still jutted out of the wall like antlers. In the corner next to the toilet was the sink at which we washed, and the square tub in which my mother did our clothes. Above it, tacked to the shelf on which were pleasantly ranged square, blue-bordered white sugar and spice jars, hung calendars from the Public National Bank on Pitkin Avenue and the Minsker Progressive Branch of the Workmen's Circle; receipts for the payment of insurance s, and household bills on a spindle; two little boxes engraved with Hebrew letters. One of these was for the poor, the other to buy back the Land of Israel. Each spring a bearded little man would suddenly appear in our kitchen, salute us with a hurried Hebrew blessing, empty the boxes (sometimes with a sidelong look of

disdain if they were not full), hurriedly bless us again for ing our less fortunate Jewish brothers and sisters, and so take his departure until the next spring, after vainly trying to persuade my mother to take still another box. We did occasionally to drop coins in the boxes, but this was usually only on the dreaded morning of "mid" and final examinations, because my mother thought it would bring me luck. * Adapted from a paragraph in A Walker in the City, by Alfred Kazin (Harvest, 1969).

from Home: A Short History of an Idea (1986) by Witold Rybczynski Differences in posture, like differences in eating utensils (knife and fork, chopsticks or fingers, for example), divide the world as profoundly as political boundaries. Regarding posture there are two camps: the sitters-up (the socalled western world) and the squatters (everyone else). Although there is no Iron Curtain separating the two sides, neither feels comfortable in the position of the other. When I eat with oriental friends I soon feel awkward sitting on the floor, my back uned, my legs numb. But squatters don't like sitting up either. An Indian household may have a dining room with table and chairs, but when the family relaxes during the hot afternoon, parents and children sit together on the floor. The driver of a three-wheeled motor scooter in Delhi has to sit on a seat, but instead of doing so in a western manner he squats cross-legged, his feet on the bench instead of on the floor (precariously to my eyes, comfortably to his). A Canadian carpenter works standing up, at a bench. My Gujarati friend

Vikram, given the choice, prefers to work sitting down, on the floor.

Watching Baseball, Playing Softball by Lubby Juggins We watch baseball: it's what we have always imagined life should be like. We play softball. It's sloppy--the way life really is. I figured that out a long time ago, on a soft summer evening when I was 13 years old and dying of embarrassment in center field as our opponents touched us up for 17 runs in the top half of the first inning. Now, beer in fist, gaping at a blank TV screen as I wait for the first major league game of the season, I'm trying to define just what it is I'm waiting for. Baseball, we know, is precise, ceremonial. It's a world bounded by foul lines, marked by fixed positions. The playing field is neatly geometric, while the game itself is a linear equation of batters retired and runs batted in. It begins with a song nobody can sing, and it ends with hoarse whispers of "Maybe next year." The story of baseball is like some ancient Greek myth: meet the enemy head on, tour the bases, and eventually head back home, there to be greeted by friends who suddenly recall how much they have missed you. That's baseball. Now softball is something different. For one thing we play wherever we can, usually on golden fields of dog patties and shattered glass, bounded by city streets and factory parking lots. We start by choosing sides, arguing over who's to be stuck with Artie Magaffe, gimlet-eyed and gimpy, and what we're going to use for home plate. We play until we get too rowdy or the kids drag us home or we lose the ball somewhere between a dumpster and a security fence. And whenever some complacent fool reminds us, "It's only a game, fellas," we come

close to lopping his head off because, of course, we know it's a game. Why else would we take it so seriously? We watch baseball and imagine what it would be like to have the power of Manny, Big Papi, and Johnny D. We play softball and that really we're more like Larry, Curly, and Moe. In baseball men are Giants--and Pirates and Tigers and Braves. In softball, at best, we're lug wrenches and nuts in Warren's Electric & Hardware. Or, more often, we're just beer-bellied slobs in Disney World t-shirts and Hooters caps. And while we imagine grandstands thundering with fans, all we've got is a runny-nosed wino chasing unicorns in the outfield, and Sammy's poor wife, squatting on the hood of their Honda, reading Harold Robbins and picking her teeth. Yet now, as I sit here glaring at the TV, I what it is we're all waiting for. That's why I get up, wheezing slightly, go to the closet and root out a stiff old glove signed by Nomar Garciaparra. The laces are missing and all the padding has been squeezed out through a hole in the thumb. I follow my belly across a schoolyard diamond--jackets for bases, a Frisbee for home plate--and I wander out to center field. In front of me a gaggle of obsolete children in middle-age are shagging, groaning, slapping their haunches, hollering "Way to go! Way to go!" I crouch down with my hands on my knees and I wait. I wait for a lopsided ball to come skidding or spinning or bounding my way. And, as ever, I will spend the afternoon fumbling and bobbling and falling flat on my can. I play softball.