Writing Desceiptive texts
30 Novembro 2016, 10:00 • Cecília Maria Beecher Martins
In preparation for students' submission of descriptive texts on 5th or 7th December. Overview of the work carried out on 23rd and 30th November below, as well as details on assignment required
Descriptive texts vs Narrative texts
Fiction is made up of a combination of descriptive and narrative texts
Narrative texts tell the story – flows
Descriptive texts help the reader understand the characters, locations & moods of a story – vocabulary based and distilled from observation
Metorphorical texts are often used to set the mood of a text.
e.g “their silence was filled with stones” Americanah
e.g. “I remember that steep hill down to the church, and the sunlit hillsides beyond the valley of the river, which I saw in the gaps between the houses like Adam's last glimpse of Paradise.” “First Confession”
We normally use more direct texts when describing characters or locations.
Before him, at a little distance, reclined a very large and very fat man, with a wide, pulpy face, and a stern expression. His large head was very grey; and his whiskers, which he wore only around his face, like a frame, were grey also. His clothing was of rich stuff, but old, and slightly frayed in places. One of his swollen legs had a pillow under it, and was wrapped in bandages. This stern-countenanced invalid was the dread Henry VIII.
The Prince and the Pauper, Mark Twain
Vocabulary you can use to describe people:
Face Shape: Square, Oval, Round, Triangular, Heart-shaped, Thin, Wide, Chiseled.
Skin & Complexion: Wrinkled, Freckled, faced. Other skin-related adjectives:faced, peaches-and-cream, glowing, paper-thin or translucent (normally for a very old person), sunburned, peeling, rough, callused, weathered, weather-beaten, craggy, leathery, mottled, dry, brown, dark.
Eyes: Shape and appearance: set, hollow, tear-filled
Eye color: black, brown, hazel, green, blue, violet, gray, amber
Eye expressions: piercing, mesmerizing, sad, sorrowful, haunted, gentle, sympathetic, warm, compassionate, expressive, bright, twinkling, lively, dancing, laughing, shifty, sly, distrusting, sleepy
Other: eyed boy, bright-eyed sister, wide-eyed child, gold-flecked eyes
Lip shape and size: thin, full, pouting, rosebud (baby’s lips, often), pursed (puckered up, as when concentrating)
Mouth expressions: laugh, smile, beam, grin, frown, grimace, scowl, sneer, curl, pout
Adjectives describing the mouth or mouth expressions: toothy, toothless, gap-toothed, kind, sweet, dimpled, relaxed, firm, serious, cruel, snarling
Descriptive Texts will show rather than tell. So what are the differences between showing sentences and telling sentences?
Telling sentences are general vague lacking the visual clarity that a reader needs to fully understand what the writer is talking about.
A showing sentence uses specific details and makes the image the writer is presenting much more vivid and alive.
Telling sentence : She went home in a bad mood.
[but reading this we don’t know what kind of a bad mood? How did she act or look?]
Showing Sentence: She stomped home angrily, her head bent low and her hands jammed in her pockets, angrily kicking rocks, dogs, anything that might dare to cross her path, even small children if they had the courage, to encounter the cloud that descended around her.
Telling Sentence: My neighbor bought a really nice old desk. [Why nice? How old? What kind of desk?]
Showing sentence: My neighbor bought a solid oak, roll-top desk made in 1885 that contains a secret drawer triggered by a hidden Spring.
Contextualising descriptive texts – descritpive texts are designed to have a function in the narrative, they are a driving part of it, but they work best when contextualised. Look at the two descriptions of characters in Frank O’ Conner’s “First Confession”.
All the trouble began when my grandfather died and my grandmother - my father's mother - came to live with us. Relations in the one house are a strain at the best of times, but, to make matters worse, my grandmother was a real old countrywoman and quite unsuited to the life in town. She had a fat, wrinkled old face, and, to Mother's great indignation, went round the house in bare feet-the boots had her crippled, she said. For dinner she had a jug of porter and a pot of potatoes with-some-times-a bit of salt fish, and she poured out the potatoes on the table and ate them slowly, with great relish, using her fingers by way of a fork.
“First Confession”
Then, to crown my misfortunes, I had to make my first confession and communion. It was an old woman called Ryan who prepared us for these. She was about the one age with Gran; she was well-to-do, lived in a big house on Montenotte, wore a black cloak and bonnet, and came every day to school at three o'clock when we should have been going home, and talked to us of hell. She may have mentioned the other place as well, but that could only have been by accident, for hell had the first place in her heart.
“First Confession”
In both cases O’ Conner contextualizes that character. Then he describes physical characteristics, and finally character traits.
Description of a location: – again care is taking to use the right vocabulary to get the mood just right, but it’s not excessive.
When I returned to that school room many years later I had to admit that there was nothing remarkable about it, nothing to indicate that it had been the center of my universe, and the place I felt safe and happy. Inside, the school smelled 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.
Assignments: Write a 300-word descriptive text that you have contextualized first indicating its relevance in the story. The final text should be no more than 500 words.