One of the key tasks that a passage of descriptive writing has to perform is to appeal to all five of the senses. The picture that your novel paints in a reader's mind should be so much more than a visual one it should also be about how things sound, smell, taste, and touch. Far too many beginning novel writers limit themselves to the purely visual in their writing.

His spiky brown hair the scar on his chin that only showed up in a certain light his chewed fingernails his ripped jeans there is nothing wrong with these things, except that they engage only the sense of sight. He wears too much aftershave smell his lips taste sweet like ripe fruit taste he has a high pitched laugh sound his hair feels wiry touch exactly the same thing applies to describing a novel's setting. The way the sea is the same blue as the sky, making it hard to tell where one ends and the other begins. Evoking all of the senses in a passage of descriptive writing is a simple way of making the description multi dimensional. I now want to talk about how to write descriptively using all of the senses by looking at each one in a little more detail. To enable the readers to see you must paint pictures for them, and for that you obviously need to draw on their sense of sight. And so, just because i advised you to engage all of the readers' senses in your writing, it doesn't mean that you shouldn't predominantly write visual descriptions.

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? the sense of smell, then, 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. Evoking the sense of smell is also a useful way of saying a lot with very few words. I didn't write those sentences descriptively like i would have done in a novel i told you, didn't show you. But even so, the mere mention of those things likely conjured up entire settings for you.

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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. If you are describing a seaside setting, for example, you could mention screeching gulls and waves breaking on pebbles to add an extra dimension to the description. If you are describing a character walking through a hotel lobby, you could mention his heels clicking on the marble or the jangle of loose change in his pocket. Sounds can sometimes be tricky to describe accurately, but one solution is to use onomatopoeias.

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Another effective way to describe sound in your fiction is to compare the sound to something else the cries of the fox sounded like a child in terrible pain. You will mostly evoke the sense of taste under two circumstances when characters are eating and drinking, and when they are kissing and canoodling. But always look for ways to incorporate it in more unexpected situations in your novel.

When a character arrives at the coast, the usual thing would be to have them smell the sea. When a character is returning to his childhood home, have him taste his mother's roast chicken and gravy when he is 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. Further down the street, her younger brother, tortured by curiosity, licks a metal pole. Make it pleasurable, like the feel of cool cotton sheets, and the readers will experience the pleasure along with the character. Sometimes, a touch is neither painful nor pleasurable but simply helps to describe the person or the place.

A greasy stove a character's cracked lips a cold, sweaty 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. Don't forget this one assuming you believe in that kind of thing and it is appropriate to the story you are telling.

Unscientific senses can be just as powerful, if not more so, than the conventional ones. Do i really have to use the five senses in writing an essay? many students feel writing descriptive essays is difficult especially if they are assigned using the five senses in the essay, yet most of us use our five senses in talking every day. Information using the senses is vital to writing a great book! it is, also, vital to writing a great essay. Imagine going to a class where the instructor only uses vision in his lectures without speaking a word.

So you are assigned a descriptive essay using the senses, what can you do? let's break this down to the five senses beginning with vision. What does the girl of your dreams look like? what color of hair does she have? what types of clothes does she wear? now, consider hearing and dating. What does the girl sound like? does she have a soft voice or a loud one? does she have an accent? next, consider smelling and dating. What does your dream girl smell like? does she use a specific perfume? does she smell like roses? consider the sense of touch and ask what your dream girl feels like.

Does she have soft hands? does she have a creamy smooth skin that is enjoyable to touch? last, but not least is taste. What does she taste like? all five senses have been used in the discussion of your dream girl. Research paper, or term paper is as easy when you think about the different senses. Can you picture the main character? what does he/she look like? what type of clothing do they wear? how tall is he/she? what color of hair does he/she have? describe the other characters. What doe they look like? how many characters are in the narrative? what does the setting look like? picture where the story is taking place and describe it. Is the character in a building, house, or in the yard? describe the place where the action is happening.

Next, what do you hear? what types of sound would you hear in the specific setting? do you hear a church bell? do you hear sounds of animals? are there people talking? if the narrative happens in a mall, describe all the different sounds. What do you smell? do different people smell differently? why? if the narrative is happening in a home, what smells might there be? for instance, someone might be baking cookies or pizza. What do the main characters taste? are they eating in the narrative? what foods and what are the specific smells? if the action takes place outside there may be different smells such as flowers or grass. What are the main characters touching? what is the main character carrying? what does he/she touch throughout the narrative? for instance, in a mystery where a person steals diamonds, the touch of diamonds could be described. How does she feel? using different senses in essays, term papers, research papers, stories, and other types of creative writing helps the reader to understand exactly what is happening. pencil or pen one piece of scrap paper and one piece of lined paper project the story prompts on a big screen or print out the lower part of this treat and share with students descriptive writing is like a download from your imagination into someone else's. To describe an experience or a scene in writing requires you to imagine that you are there, so that you can tell someone else all about it in enough detail to make your reader feel as though he or she is there, too.

To successfully describe things in writing, you have to unleash the information gathering power of your five senses. To describe things, think what your five senses were telling your brain, or would be, during that experience, event or situation. We rely a lot on our vision, so more than likely most of your description will center around things that you saw. But there's power in describing details picked up by your other senses, as well, and including at least one detail involving each of your five senses is a great way to round out a descriptive story. So, for example, if you were describing a championship basketball game, but the point was to describe the whole experience of the game, and not just the basketball action, you could describe what you. § an ambulance's siren sounded mournfully right outside the gym door as emergency medical personnel carried the point guard out on a stretcher to have his season ending broken leg treated. § the winning team ran around the court and slapped each fan a high five, thanking them for their support all season.