Tips for Descriptive Writing

I received my IGCSE results recently, and am pleased to announce that I received an A* in English Language (95%). Hopefully, this grade reflects my pedagogic skills.

Here's another descriptive writing essay. Soon, I'll just pile up all my descriptive essays into one post so that they can be easily referred to at any time.

Imagine you enter a crowded train or bus for a short journey. Describe your surroundings and your fellow travelers during the journey. [25]

A great billow of black smoke accompanies impatient yelling horns from the front of the seemingly endless line of faded blue box cars. I glanced at my leather watch with sudden realization and urged my legs to move at impossible rates as my tied luggage flew behind me. Glancing into the packed compartment, I scolded myself for the greed of a few extra dollars.

Faded paint was peeling off the sides of the wall, exposing the discolored steel body. The rigid seats, which could barely accommodate an infant, had bits and pieces of spongy “cushion,” whose yellow had amalgamated with a moldy green and dirt brown. A reeking odor seeped into my nose - was it the hot, heavy, incomprehensible smell of tens of human beings crowded together, packed like hen in a cage? Or the pungent stench from the grimy, stained restroom? Rushing past the green, rolling hills, and the petite rustic villages, seen from the slits of the rusting grills of the small, alas implausible, getaways, and hearing the ending slurp of my cool, sweet lemonade only made it worse.

My legs screamed for a break. I squeezed through, gauging each step through the array of backpacks and luggage as though it were lava. A mother’s eyes were heavy from the duty she was left with as her children slept on her shoulders. Her blouse was stained with apple sauce, bits of green grape peels. She pushed aside bunches of salt-and-pepper hair from her face that had strayed from the tight bun atop her head with her calloused hands. Gazing at his newspaper, an old man pulled down his ancient brown hat and pushed up his thick black glasses, futilely attempting to tune out the bickering young couple by his side. The woman narrowed her eyes furtively, her long, silky hair swaying as she moved her reddening face from side to side. The old man scooted away carefully, saving his Armani pants from the sticky, moldy gum and the bread crumbs, the shrieks of the woman, taking a sniff of the fresh air to escape.

The announcer’s call of my stop was a call from heaven. Pushing through the surge of people, the mountains of bags, my only regret was that I would have to come back this way again.
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In my opinion, descriptive writing has always been the easier one of the two options. It's quite easy to fill up the essay with flowery language. Picturing images in your head from your daily life and just talking about them is essentially what you have to do, which makes the whole process so easy. For narrative writing, I always had trouble finding an end to my story, or keeping it from going off on a tangent. 

That's why it's important to weigh your strengths and weaknesses when choosing between descriptive and narrative writing, and when you do choose one, just stick with it. For those who have a similar mindset like I do, I think these descriptive writing essays will be quite helpful to them.

Next time, I'll switch on to a different section of the papers, most in likely Paper 1, after posting the remainder of my essays. If you'd like even more descriptive essays, please email me at TheEnglishLanguageForIGCSE@gmail.com.