Please can anyone help me with writing a descriptive write up using annotations of 5 sense
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Answer:
1. DESCRIPTIVE WRITING AND THE SENSE OF SIGHT
Okay, you don’t want to restrict yourself to just how things look, but sight is still the most important sense to engage in good sensory description.
In the absence of a movie camera, describing how things look with words is the only way you’ll enable your readers to “see.”
Your best bet here? Don’t attempt to paint the full picture, describing every tree and building and passing dog in sight. Instead…
Focus on just a handful of details (and allow readers to paint the rest of the picture for themselves).
Make those details the best ones you can find.
You can read about using the best details in your writing here. For now, understand that good description is all about quality, not quantity.
You can make a reader “see” with very little (their brain will do the rest). And precisely the same thing applies to making them hear, taste, touch and smell.
Speaking of which…
2. DESCRIPTIVE WRITING AND THE SENSE OF SMELL
Smell is the most nostalgic of the 5 senses. Which of us isn’t transported back to school when we smell over-cooked cabbage, or to childhood summers when we smell freshly-mown grass?
Incidentally, smell is a useful way of getting characters to remember an event from the past, in the form of a flashback (assuming that this event is important to the understanding of the present story). But that’s getting off topic…
For descriptive writing, evoking the sense of smell is a great way of saying a lot with very few words. Try to imagine the following…
The smell of a woodland in summer after rain.
Sour milk in the refrigerator.
The first smell of the sea through a car window.
I didn’t write those sentences descriptively, like I would have done in a novel (I told you, didn’t show you). Even so, the mere mention of those things likely conjured up entire settings for you.
So again, just finding one really evocative smell to describe will go a long way.
3. DESCRIPTIVE WRITING AND THE SENSE OF SOUND
Few settings are silent. And if they are truly silent, describing the absence of sound will be interesting in itself.
Characters speaking and coughing and banging things with hammers is one way of adding a soundtrack to a scene. Another way is to incorporate the sense of sound into the description of settings and characters.
So if you’re describing a seaside setting, for example, mention screeching gulls and waves breaking on pebbles to add an extra dimension to the description.
If you describe a character walking through a hotel lobby, mention his metal heels clicking on the marble, or the jangle of loose change in his pocket.
Sounds are tricky to describe accurately, so here is a good place to use a figure of speech. One solution is an onomatopoeia…
Jangle
Clatter
Crash
Similes work well, too…
The cry of the fox sounded like a child in terrible pain.
4. DESCRIPTIVE WRITING AND THE SENSE OF TASTE
You’ll mostly evoke the sense of taste under two circumstances. When the characters are eating and drinking. And when they’re kissing and canoodling! (When they are actively using their mouths and tongues, in other words.)
But always look for ways to incorporate taste descriptions in more unexpected situations in your novel. For example…
When a character arrives at the coast, the usual thing would be to have them smell the sea. Instead, have them taste the salt on the breeze.
When a young boy captures a frog at the bottom of the garden, have him lick it… then recoil.
And when a woman returns to her childhood home, have her taste her mother’s roast chicken when she’s still 100 miles away.
Even if you don’t actually describe a taste, just mentioning the thing we taste with – the tongue – can be powerful in descriptive fiction. For example…
It’s the first icy day of winter and it starts to snow. A character looks up and tries to catch the flakes on her tongue.
Further down the street, her younger brother licks a metal pole. Oops!
5. DESCRIPTIVE WRITING AND THE SENSE OF TOUCH
Like all five senses, touch can be painful or pleasurable.
Make it pleasurable, like the feel of cool cotton sheets on a summer night, and the readers will experience the pleasure along with the character.
Make it painful, like being head-butted on the nose, and the readers will wince. Like you just did.
Sometimes, a touch is neither painful nor pleasurable, but simply helps to describe the person or the place. For example…
A greasy stove.
Cracked lips.
A cold handshake.
Sometimes the touch itself is what is important, not what the thing being touched feels like. A character reaching out to touch another character can be extremely powerful under the right circumstances, as can the laying of a hand on a headstone