Commonsense Composition

http://www.ck12.org Chapter 1. Descriptive Essays

1. Write a person descriptive essay about a person in your family following one of the organizational schemes
   listed above.


2. Write a person descriptive essay about an important person in history using the event organization. Instead
   of indicating how the person is important to you, indicate how the person is important or significant within
   history.

Place

Much like a person descriptive essay, the most important aspect of a descriptive essay about a place is your reason
for writing it. Consider all of the places you have been to in your life – not only the places you have visited on
vacation but also those that you visit in everyday life. Every day, or at least during the school week, how many
different places do you go to? Most likely, you would start your day at home before leaving for school. Do you stop
to get breakfast or coffee along the way or do you stop and pick up a friend? While you would spend the majority
of your day at school, do you leave campus to get lunch? How about after school, do you go straight home or do
you go to a friend’s house or to a local hang out? Considering all the places you visit in one day, which would you
pick to write about and why? These are the most important questions to answer when writing your place descriptive
essay, and answering them will help you decide the organization of your paper.

The organization of a descriptive essay about a place is much like the organization of a descriptive essay about a
person. Thus, there are two main organizational schemes that you can choose from when composing a descriptive
essay about a place: one that focuses on certain characteristics of the place or one that focuses on a specific event (or
set of events) related to a place. For instance, for the first type of organization, you would focus on the reasons, or
characteristics, that indicate why you enjoy, or dislike, a place. For the second type, you would focus on the events
that explain why this place is important to you. For example, if you were writing a descriptive place essay about
Disneyland, these are the two ways in which you could organize your paper.

TABLE1.3: Below is a table detailing the two types of organizational schemes.

Organization Type Characteristics Event

Criteria

a. Rides

b. Food

c. Atmosphere

The last family vacation before your

older sibling went to college and

moved out of the house

Explanation You would organize your paper

around the main reasons why you

enjoy Disneyland with each of these

characteristics serving as a body

paragraph.

You would organize your paper

around this event and how it has

made Disneyland more important to

you.

While it may not matter which type or organization you choose, you must always make the place the focus of your
paper. Thus, be sure the events are characteristics you describe in the essay do not outshine the importance of the
place they are describing. For instance, following the example above, when discussing the rides at Disneyland, do
not focus too much on rides at other theme parks. While comparing the rides at Disneyland to rides at other theme
park rides does stress how much better they are, do not let the rides at other amusement parks overshadow the rides