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Writing a Descriptive Essay. Four Basic Steps. PREWRITING. Gathering Ideas : Brainstorming or ‘thinking on paper’ can help you find specific details and sense descriptions.
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Writing a Descriptive Essay Four Basic Steps
PREWRITING • Gathering Ideas: Brainstorming or ‘thinking on paper’ can help you find specific details and sense descriptions. • The Dominant Impression: This is the main point of the description. Often you will find ideas that keep coming up in brainstorming. The dominant impression helps form the topic sentence (for a paragraph) or thesis statement (for an essay).
Planning • Using the Dominant Impression: Once you have written the topic sentence, list the details that you discovered under it. Check the details by asking: • Do all the details relate to the topic sentence? • Once you have found details that relate to the topic sentence, think about the order of the details. • Time Sequence- first to last • Spatial Position- top to bottom or right to left • Similar Types- for example, all about how a meal looks, then all about how a meal tastes.
Drafting and revising • When drafting, your goal is to put your ideas in paragraph form so you can see what needs to be revised. • Using the outline you created while planning will help you remember the details and their order. • Please see the checklist for revising a descriptive paragraph on pg. 74
Polishing and proofreading • The finishing touches of changing words, changing or adding transitions, and sharpening details happen during this last step.