When you write a description for the GCSE English Language examination, your job is to entertain. Firstly, draw your reader into a mini-world by bringing it to life with carefully chosen words, and then keep them engaged by describing its most interesting aspects to create a powerful atmosphere.
Engaging the reader’s senses helps them to imagine the scene and, more importantly, FEEL the atmosphere you are creating. For the purposes of strengthening your descriptive powers, try leaving out figurative language such as similes and metaphors to start with - (we’ll return to those later) - and just see how vivid and convincing a scene you can make with sensory language alone.
Visual description will usually dominate, since vision is the strongest sense for sighted readers. The other senses should also be present though, and can be worked into your writing in a fairly natural way, as shown in the examples below.
One of the most effective ways of producing a really vivid and immersive description is to describe the light that you want the reader to imagine. After all, without light we can’t see anything, and the type of light we experience can deeply affect our mood.
Imagine a grey, rainy morning in February, and then contrast this with the soft, rosy light just before sunset on an August evening. Whenever you describe a scene, consider the season and time of day, and whether the light is falling outdoors or indoors.
The adjectives that we can use to describe light are many, extending far beyond ‘bright’ and ‘dim, and include:
Sparkling, gleaming, intense, , soft, faint, flat, radiant, incandescent, fluorescent, flickering, brightening, fading, constant, flickering, dazzling, painful......There are many lists of adjectives on the Internet, but make sure that you are using the word which creates the atmosphere you want, rather than using a ‘fancy’ word just because it sounds good.
For example, advanced adjectives such as ‘iridescent’ , ‘crepuscular’ or ‘coruscating’ are wonderful descriptors, but only if you know exactly what they mean, since they have very specific usages.
You should also consider the reader that you are aiming at - would your reader understand the vocabulary you are using, and is it appropriate for the genre you are writing in? This may determine whether your writing is judged to be ‘compelling’, as per the GCSE English Language mark scheme. With these cautions in mind, you still should aim to vary your vocabulary and sentence structure as much as possible.
Use the best word that you understand fully in context, so that you can properly cast your descriptive spell rather than break it by confusing the reader (or yourself).
You can describe the quality of the light itself, but remember what the light does to the colours in the world and in your imagination. How is it falling on, shining through, diffused by or reflected from various surfaces? Making this clear in your writing will bring the scene to life:
1a) ‘The soft morning light filters through the lace curtains.’
2a) ‘The guttering candle flickers in a dark corner of the damp cellar, casting ghoulish shadows on the stone walls.’
3a) ‘The sun reveals the dust of the abandoned mill, as shafts of light flood through the broken windows, the shards of glass on the floor scattering the dazzling light into a hundred rainbows.’
Notice how easy it is to blend in description of other senses to make the scene appeal more to the whole body of the reader, rather than just the mind’s eye:
Touch - ‘lace’, ‘damp’, ‘stone’, ‘broken glass’
Smell - ‘damp’ again, ‘dust’, ‘guttering candle’
Sound - These scenes are deliberately quiet - Silence is a very effective ‘sound’ atmospherically. However, the reader may faintly ‘hear’ the ‘broken glass’, or the sputter of the candle.
Taste - This is not explicit here, and should not be added for the sake of it. It is easy to bring in though, especially if you want to suggest a sense of people either present or absent from the scene. For example:
1b) ‘The soft morning light filters through the lace curtains, bathing the half-finished fried breakfast on the table in a sickly glow.’
2b) ‘The guttering candle flickers in a dark corner of the damp cellar, casting ghoulish shadows on the stone walls, and on the rows of rusted tins, emergency supplies of baked beans, macaroni cheese and chicken curry.’
3b) ‘The sun reveals the dust of the abandoned mill, as shafts of light flood through the broken windows, the shards of broken glass scattering the dazzling light into a hundred rainbows playing across the oil-stained concrete floor strewn with empty crisp packets and sweet wrappers’.
Don’t worry - highly descriptive sentences need not be as long as the last example above. However, it is good practice to extend the sensory description by starting with a basic visual description including lighting, and to then add information to shape the atmosphere of your scene. As you can see, we have established basic moods using lighting,
‘The soft morning light filters…’, ‘The guttering candle flickers…’, and ‘The sun reveals the dust…’
and then extended the description to other senses to envelope the reader physically in the scene.
You can try this approach with any scene you can visualise, and on any scale. You could try the examples below, by first deciding what mood is suggested by the basic sentence, and then extending it to capture the reader’s imagination and senses. Ideally, it should move YOU emotionally, then it will work for many others.
- The coloured jewels glittered…
- The sunlight danced on the white water of the rapids…
- The last light of the day faded gradually from the parlour…
- The fluorescent strip lights in the office were achingly bright, one or two buzzing and flickering intermittently, …
If you work on examples such as these, and develop it as a practice in your description generally, your writing will become more vivid to your readers.
Write often, read often, and good luck!