Imagery

1. Imagery Language that creates a concrete or a vivid sensation. Most images are visual--they create pictures in the reader’s mind. However, images can also appeal to the sense of taste, hearing, smell, or touch.

2. For example “Even through the nights, the pall of heat never broke. With a couple of other kids, I would go across 110th Street to Central Park and walk among the hundreds of people, singles and families, who slept on the grass, next to their big alarm clocks, which set up a mild cacophony of the seconds passing, one clock’s ticks syncopating with another’s. Babies cried in the darkness, men’s deep voices murmured, and a woman let out an occasional high laugh beside the lake.” --Arthur Miller “Before Air-Conditioning”

3. Examples from “The Gift of the Magi” “She stood by the window and looked out dully at a gray cat walking a gray fence in a gray back yard.” “So now Della’s beautiful hair fell about her rippling and shining like a cascade of brown waters. It reached below her knee and made itself almost a garment for her.”

4. Write your own images • A disgusting plate of food. Use visual and smell. • A bitterly cold day. Use sense of touch. • Outdoors in a tent at night. OR On a crowded school bus. Use sense of hearing. • The dentist office. Use sense of taste.