HOW TO WRITE A DESCRIPTIVE ESSAY in 2025
HOW TO WRITE A DESCRIPTIVE ESSAY
The first step in writing any descriptive essay is to choose what you are going to describe. While the topic of your descriptive essay will sometimes be provided by your teacher or professor, you will sometimes get to choose your own topic when writing a descriptive essay. Like every other essay, writing a descriptive essay requires that you have a thesis. This said, the thesis will not be as explicit as when you are writing a standard academic essay. Instead, the thesis of a descriptive essay will represent the core element of the entity you are describing. This thesis should be placed within your introduction and, even though your supporting body paragraphs may not all be associated with this core element, they should all refer back to this core element in some way. Writing a descriptive essay thus very much involves using a thesis but this thesis might be less obvious than in writing a traditional essay.
Once you have created your core idea or feature, you should write your descriptive essay by using body paragraphs that break down the different elements of what you are describing in a logical or coherent way. For example, if you are writing a descriptive essay on a dog in the traditional five paragraph format, you might wish to use the first body paragraph to describe how the dog looks, use the second body paragraph to describe how the dog behaves, and use the third body paragraph to describe how the dog interacts with people. You can then tie these different elements of the dog you are writing about in your descriptive essay to the core element of the dog that represents your thesis. This thesis could range from the idea that the dog loves people and food to the idea that the dog is sad and depressed because it is stuck at the pound.
Finally, and while the example of the dog provided above is very simple, it reflects the core logic of any descriptive essay. When you are writing a descriptive essay, you are using themes, characteristics, and elements of what you are describing to build an aggregated portrait of the entity in question. Writing a descriptive essay means that logically organizing your description of what you are describing is critical. While your professor will certainly be grading you on how vivid your description is and how well you have used grammar, writing a descriptive essay is also an exercise in organization and this is something that will strongly affect the grade that you get for
