Descriptive Essay Assignment

In your Personal Essay, you were asked to draw upon your memory of a specific event and to illuminate (shed light on) that experience. You went beyond the basic facts of the event and attempted to describe the details of your experience, focusing perhaps on your thoughts and feelings as you went through the experience. This assignment, likewise, asks you to take something simple and to present the reader with a more vivid (alive) and dynamic (active and moving) description. In your business letter, you had to describe a problem with a product or service. And, in your discussion board posts and responses, you had to describe the space in which you were sitting when you were typing your response. Description plays a significant role in almost all writing that we do; this essay asks you to develop the crucial skill of describing things with words in order to produce a dominant impression in the mind of your reader.

This assignment requires you to write a descriptive essay. A descriptive essay can be defined in the following manner:

The descriptive essay is a genre of essay that asks the student to describe somethingobject, person, place, experience, emotion, situation, etc. This genre encourages the students ability to create a written account of a particular experience. What is more, this genre allows for a great deal of artistic freedom (the goal of which is to paint an image that is vivid and moving in the mind of the reader). [https://owl.purdue.edu/owl/general_writing/academic_writing/essay_writing/descriptive_essays.html]

Part I

For this essay, you must provide a 2-3 page description of a PLACE. Your goal is to provide as much detail of this place as you can. Your essay should not focus as much on your experience of that place, except as it helps to communicate the general feeling of anyone who might visit this place. In other words, you are aiming at a description of the place, not your personal experience of that place.

Part II

Once you have settled on the dominant impression that you want your essay to produce for the reader, send a brief 1 or 2 sentence explanation or statement of that theme to Rae via WeChat. Do not put this statement on your essay; it is important that I NOT know what you want the impression to be when I read your paper. Rae will compile these statements and send them to me AFTER I have read the essays.