Description

Description is a key technique of development:  it provides vividness and specificity to your writing, giving your readers details, images, and impressions that they need to fully understand and appreciate the content of writing.  Good description appeals to the senses:  sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch— can all be effective in connecting with the reader.   Here is a descriptive paragraph relating to the Sunlight Foundation piece above.

[Description] Walking into the Sunlight Foundation’s offices, one might be surprised by their sparseness.  Some flickering fluorescent lights hang in casings from the ceiling, itself spotted and water-stained from leaking pipes and careless upstairs neighbors.  The office furniture for the volunteers is mismatched:  a particle-board desk, worn swivel chair, and ancient PC whirring next to a gigantic monitor and phone whose handle is worn smooth with use sit next to an aluminum schoolteacher’s desk, with broken drawers and pockmarked with graffiti.  The air smells of coffee, courtesy of a battered pot in the corner. Phones are always ringing.  The office that Markos and Sams share is not much better:  they sit face-to-face in a windowless interior room, flat-screen computer monitors (a luxury) back-to-back.  Pictures of their clients plaster one wall of the office, smiling old faces reminding these young people every day of what they come to work for.  

Which of the five senses does the writer appeal to in this passage?  What does he accomplish by doing this?   What does it feel like in the offices of the Sunlight Foundation? 

Exercise: Description

Describe in a short paragraph the items / places listed as best you can using details that appeal to the five senses (sight, hearing, smell, touch, taste):

An Apple iPhone

The neighborhood surrounding your university

One of your classrooms at your current university

Now, what types of descriptive details would be relevant for an essay on one of our three topics?

1. The Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C.
2. Rosa Parks, Civil Rights activist
3. Sexual harassment in the workplace.

As practice, write a descriptive paragraph on some element of one of these three subjects: