Descriptive writing skills, part one
Writing good description is surprisingly tough, but it’s such a useful skill to have, whether you’re copywriting, blogging or working on your novel.
This is the first of a series of three posts that look at some techniques for getting description right.
A great way to make your copy or general writing readable and interesting is to ground it in everyday experience, preferring the concrete to the abstract. If you’re writing technical copy your descriptive work will be pretty easy – most of it will focus around objects – but if you’re writing, say, a blog that requires you to narrate bits and pieces from your everyday experience, you’ll be doing (or should be doing) some concrete, descriptive writing of the sort you find in novels or travel books.
Writing good description is very tough, especially if you’re making too much of an effort to be descriptive. Overwritten description is bloated, boring and difficult to read. There are four main reasons for this:
• Description usually demands the use of adjectives and at least a few adverbs. Once you’ve started using a few, you may fall into the trap of using too many.
• Clichés creep in. It’s easier to write ‘it was as hot as an oven’ than to think of an original simile.
• Inexperienced writers try to include as much detail as they can in descriptive writing, which makes it dense and confusing.
• Unless you’re thinking hard about sentence structure, it’s easy to use grammatical constructions that are complicated and tiring to read.
The way you construct description depends on your writing style, but there are some basic principles you can use to keep it precise and effective. The first one we’re going to look at deals with the tense of your writing.
English has several ways of indicating that something happened in the past. The two most common are the simple past tense:
And the progressive (or continuous) past tense, which is formed by adding a present participle to the simple past tense of the verb ‘to be’, like this:
Many writers have a tendency to use the progressive when they don’t really need to. It’s longer and clumsier than the simple past tense, and the repeated ‘ing’ sounds can mess up the rhythm and feel of sentences, even when read silently.A third common way of indicating that something happened in the past is to use the present tense in a narrative format.
So I walk into the first restaurant I see and the waiter says to me, ‘I’m sorry sir, we’re nearly full, but I can fit you in the corner.’ So I end up this tiny little table by the kitchen door. I wouldn’t have minded, but the food was terrible.
Notice how the final sentence (‘…the food was terrible’) flips back into the regular simple past tense. This kind of narrative approach is very flexible, and you can switch between simple past and present tenses, depending on what feels comfortable. We tend to do this quite a lot in everyday speech, and although it’s not a good idea to use it all the time (it can become annoying), if you can work it into your narrative blog entries it can give them a very active, immediate feel. Because it’s so direct, the grammar involved is usually straightforward and clear.
It’s quite easy to get involved in some tortuous grammatical constructions when you’re writing description, and the passive voice can creep in. When you’ve written a passage of description, go back and look at the grammar carefully – how could you simplify it? Any simplification that doesn’t change the meaning is probably an improvement.
In the next instalment we’ll look at how to focus on the important details of your descriptive writing without getting bogged down in irrelevancy.