DESCRIPTIVE ESSAYS

The purpose of descriptive writing is to make readers see, feel, taste, touch and hear what we have seen, felt, tasted, touched and heard. Whether we're describing a person, a place, or a thing, our aim is to evoke a scene or to reveal a subject through vivid, carefully 

arranged details. A good descriptive essay is like a window into another world.

Use precise descriptive details to evoke a distinctive mood as well as to convey a memorable picture. Details that are carefully chosen and well organized can help to make a piece of writing more precise, vivid, convincing, and interesting. They serve the narrative in terms of dramatization, characterization, structure, and style. Choose words that convey something to which many readers can relate.

• In describing a character, we look for details that not only show what an individual looks like, but also provide clues to his or her personality. Focus on the character´s habits and actions, not on the physical appearance.

• In describing a thing, begin the paragraph with a topic sentence that identifies it, describe the item in four or five sentences, using the details that you listed after probing your topic. Explain briefly its significance to you and conclude the paragraph with a sentence that emphasizes the personal value of the item.

• With thoughtfully organized details, we can also suggest the personality--or mood--of a place. As you write each paragraph, place signals to help to establish cohesion so that the reader can be guided  clearly from one detail to the next

20 Topic Suggestions

• a waiting room
• a treasured belonging
• a favourite restaurant
• your dream house
• your ideal roommate
• your memory of a place that you visited as a child 
• an accident scene
• a place that holds a special meaning
• a place I could stay forever
• a child's secret hiding place
• the inside of a spaceship
• your old neighborhood
• a small town cemetery
• a pet 
• a painting
• a character from a book, movie or television programme
• a photograph
• a hospital emergency room
• a particular friend or family member

Nobel Prize in Literature awarded to British author Kazuo Ishiguro

62-year old English author Kazuo Ishiguro has been awarded the Nobel Literature prize for 2017.

Mr. Ishiguro is best known for his novels “The Remains of the Day,” about a butler serving an English lord in the years leading up to World War II, and “Never Let Me Go,” a melancholy dystopian love story set in a British boarding school.

 “If you mix Jane Austen and Franz Kafka then you have Kazuo Ishiguro in a nutshell, but you have to add a little bit of Marcel Proust into the mix,” said Sara Danius, the permanent secretary of the Swedish Academy.In a career that spans some 35 years, Mr. Ishiguro has gained wide recognition for his stark, emotionally restrained prose. His novels are often written in the first person, with unreliable narrators who are in denial about truths that are gradually revealed to the reader. He has obsessively returned to the same themes in his work, including the fallibility of memory, self-delusion,  mortality and the porous nature of time.

The writer said that the award was “flabbergastingly flattering”. He said:

“It’s a magnificent honour, mainly because it means that I’m in the footsteps of the greatest authors that have lived, so that’s a terrific commendation.”

Ishiguro was born in 1954 in Nagasaki to Japanese parents. But the family moved to England in 1960 when his father got a job as an oceanographer in Surrey.

Congratulations, Mr Ishiguro!

"The Remains of the Day" official trailer  (1993)

"Never Let Me Go" official trailer  (2010)