- the quality of the writing, including idea development and organization
- the quality and accuracy of the language used to express these ideas
When you begin either writing task on the TOELF, always read the prompt carefully to make sure that you know exactly which essay type you are being asked to write.
Recognizing Descriptive Essay Prompts
The most important function of a descriptive essay is to provide information. The second function is to explain that information so that the reader can best understand it. A descriptive essay is not intended to argue a point or defend an opinion.
What does the prompt for a descriptive essay look like? Look at the following examples:
What do you consider the distinctive qualities of a good student to be?
Identify and describe the most interesting geographical feature of your country.
In your opinion, what has been the most memorable event of the last ten years?Describe the event, supporting your answer with specific details.
The active verbs in these prompts include consider, identify, and describe. All of them are asking you to provide an explanation and details about a particular topic in order to help the reader to understand it better. That is the function of a descriptive essay.
Planning a Descriptive Essay
Good planning is essential to succesful essay writing. Even experienced writers make careful plans before beginning to write.
There are several steps to planning an essay. All of them should be followed closely; following them will help you write your essay more easily. Following is a list of steps you should use to help you write a better essay. It is important to remember that the steps of the writing process do not necessarily have to be in this order, nor does one step need to be completed before another step is started.
- Read the prompt (or the assignment) very carefully to make sure you understand what it is asking you to do.
- Consider the topic, thoroughly.
- Brainstorm ideas about the topic.
- Evaluate your ideas, and select those that will best help you respond to the prompt or assignment.
- Organize your ideas in the order you wish to present them. (This is sometimes called outlining.)
- Identify and list details, examples, and other supporting information you can use with each of the ideas in your list.
- Write your introduction.
- Write your body paragraphs.
- Write your conclusion.
- Revise, edit, proofread.
Note that at any point you can go back to an earlier step if you need to.
Brainstorming
It is a process that you use to generate ideas about a topic before you actually begin writing. If you have lots of ideas down on paper, you can think about each of them, how they best fit together, and which ones you actually wants to use in your writing. There are several techniques for brainstorming. They are sometines referred to as listing, clustering and freewriting.
Listing
Listing is a good technique for getting lots of ideas on paper quickly. You simply write down every idea related to the topic that comes into your head. It isn't necessary to stop and consider each one - the main thing is just to get lots of ideas written down.
Here's a list of writer has generated in response to the prompt, " What are the most important impacts of automobiles on society?" : expense, smog, traffic accidents, can be beautifull, fun to drive, time spent commuting, noise, economic importance, convenience.
At this point, you may decide to divide the list into positive and negative impacts. Another possibility is to select only those effects that are most clearly social, and not personal, that is, the importance of automobilies in the national economy, the pollution they cause, and the harm done by the many accidents hat happen every year. Alternatively, you could select only those with which you jave personal experience in the blank space below. It's up to you to rank, organize, or rearrange your list.
Clustering
One method of brainstorming is called clustering. Clustering is much like listing, except that it allow you to begin organizing your ideas as you think of them. You begin with just a few central ideas, and then link each new idea as you think appropriate. For example:
- Negative: noise, smog, commuting, expense, economic importance
- Positive: convenience, artistic merit, economic importance, fun
Freewriting
Another brainstorming technique is called freewriting, and it works just the way it sounds. You put pen to paper and start writing about the topic, noting down whatever thought comes into your head, until enough good ideas take shape to write the essay. There are two important things to remember about freewriting. First, don't worry about grammar and spelling. Those can be taken care of later. Second, don't stop writing until you're finished. It's important to let your thoughts keep flowing. Here's an example:
Impacts of automobiles on society, well, there are lots, there's the cost of ownership, fuel, insurance, and so on, there's traffic accidents, noise from engines, noise from alarms beeping, all the time you have to spend in your car if you commute to work - but I'm only thinking of negative things - let's see, they're sure convenient, and they can be fun to drive and some them are really quite beautifull, and can be collector's items, and building them sure provides a lot of jobs for people. But smog's a real downside...
From this, you can draw lots of ideas for an essay. Freewriting also offers the advantage of allowing you to begin to experiment with expressing your ideas in phrases and sentences.
Outlining
Once you have generated enough good ideas for writing your essay, the next step is to organize them and to procide supporting details. A good way to plan your essay is to prepare an outline. An outline is a chart that shows exactly how the essay is to be organized, giving you a kind of blueprint to use as you write. This way you won't wander away from your topic, get distracted, or forget what you were going to say next.
In an outline, each subsection is listed in order using Roman numerals, and supporting ideas will be listed under each subsection using the alphabet.
Here is an outline for an essay about the impact of automobiles. If this were an outline for a 30-minute TOEFL essay, each Roman numeral would represent one paragraph of writing.
- I. Introduction
- II. Social
- A. Economic importance
- B. Traffic accidents
- C. Air pollution
- III.Personal
- A. Time spent commuting
- B. Convenience
- C. Hobby
- 1. Recreational driving
- 2. Collection
- IV. Conclusion
An even more detailed outline could be prepared, including all the supporting information and examples the author intends to use. It's not necessary to use so much detail, however - an outline like this one that uses just the main ideas and the supporting details van be very helpful on its own. Nor is it necessary to use all the numbers and letters exactly the way they are used here - just make sure that you can understand what the outline is telling you.
Finally, don't imagine that just because you've drawn an outline, you have to follow it exactly. As you write, you may change your mind about how to organize the essay. That's not a problem - just adjust the outline to reflect your changes.
Writing the Introduction to a Descriptive Essay
Like any essay, a descriptive essay should be composed of several identifiable parts, each with its own specific function. These parts usually include an introduction, a body, and a conclusion. First, we will focus on the introductory paragraph.
You may recall some information about introductions from the reading lesson. Remember, an introduction must accomplish several tasks. First, it should introduce the topic of the essay. Ideally, this can be achieved in an interesting manner that catches and holds the reader's attention, which is a rhetorical device called a hook. Second, an introduction must provide some context for the discussion, including any information the reader may need to understand the essay as whole. Third, an introductory paragraph to a descriptive essay should provide the reader with a good idea of the topics that will be addressed in the essay, and the order in which they will appear. This function is called forecasting, and it is accomplished in a thesis statement.
The Hook
A hook can take several forms. It might be a fascinating fact, a provocative, emotionally charged statement, a novel interpretation of an accepted fact, or even a few sentences that briefly relate an event exemplifying or introducing the essay's topic. Whatever its form, the hook's principle function is to attract the reader's attention and make him or her want to read further.
Background Information
Having grabbed the reader's attention, the introductory paragraph can then provide any necessary background information. Some of this may have already been provided in the hook. It is important to provide enough information here to introduce the topic, but not so much that the introduction becomes a part of the discussion itself. You may need to answer some of these questions:
- Why is this topic important?
- What background information should the reader have before reading further?
- What has motivated me to address this topic?
Definitions are often helpful in introduction, especially when you suspect that readers may initially misunderstand the topic. It may also be desirable for your reader what sources you used to find the information you used in the essay.
The Thesis Statement
The last sentence or two of the introduction to an essay is usually to tell the reader what to expect from the essay, or to forecast. You can think of it as a kind of table of contents for the essay: a list of topics, and the order in which they occur. For shorter essays, you can simply list the topic of each paragraph of your discussion. Of, if your essay os divided into more general subsections, you can refer to the main idea of each of the subsections.
Writing the Body Paragraphs
When you have finished your introduction and have written your thesis statement, the next step is to write body paragraphs. A body paragraphs has two main parts.
The Topic Sentence
The first part, the topic sentence, introduces the main idea that the paragraph will discuss. It also provides supporting details, which explain the topic. Usually, a topic sentence is a general comment about the idea that paragraph will discuss. Sometimes you can include a closing sentence, of a transition to the next paragraph, though these are not always necessary. Can you see how a body paragraph looks a lot like a mini-essay?
Supporting Details
Supporting details can also take a variety of forms. Typically, these can be descriptions, explanations, definitions, examples, or a mixture of the four. In all cases, the supporting information should include specific discussion of the idea introduced in the topic sentence and should be carefully chosen to help the reader understand the topic. A paragraph should never include information that is not directly related to its topic.
When describing an aspect of your topic, try to use words that are carefully chosen to carry the most information in the least space. Efficiency is important in academic writing. Remember that it is your goal to help your readers understand, not to overwhelm them with unimportant details.
The same is true of explanations. If your topic requires a reference to complex processes, mechaninsms, or systems, supply only enough information to help your reader understand how this fits into the topic as a whole and no more. Too much information can quickly become exhausting for the reader, and writing it all down takes up your valuable time.
Definitions are mos useful when you suspect that the reader may be unfamiliar with a particular term or label that is a key part of your essay. The definition supplied when the term is first mentioned prevents confusion.
Examples are the most important kind of supporting detail you can provide. Beginning writers often fail to use them enough. A well-chosen example can turn a weak argument into a strong one, help to convince a skeptical reader, and add a measure of interest and color to an otherwise dull discussion.
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