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Writing A Narrative Essay

This guide will help students with writing narrative essays. The guide will discuss how to use descriptive writing and dialogue.

Using Descriptive Language

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The primary purpose of descriptive writing is to describe a person, place or thing in such a way that a picture is formed in the reader's mind. Good descriptive writing includes many vivid sensory details that paint a picture and appeals to all of the reader's senses of sight, hearing, touch, smell and taste when appropriate. Good descriptive writing often makes use of figurative language such as analogies, similes, and metaphors to paint a visual picture.

Techniques in Writing

simile: a figure of speech involving the comparison of one thing with another thing of a different kind, used to make a description more emphatic or vivid.

A metaphor says that something (a person, place or a thing) is something else.

Alliteration: the occurrence of the same letter or sound at the beginning of adjacent or closely connected words.

Personification: An inanimate object is given human feelings or it acts in the way that a person might.

Onomatopoeia refers to words that sound like what they mean.

Hyperbole: exaggerated statements or claims not meant to be taken literally.

Pathetic fallacy: the attribution of human feelings and responses to inanimate things or animals.

An oxymoron is a phrase that combines two words that contradict each other.

Emotive Language: this is language that has been pruposely written to make the reader feel a certain emotion.

Foreshadowing is where the writer includes hints about what's going to happen next in the story. They can be subtle or extremely obvious.

Types of Descriptive words

Adjectives 

Adjective: is a word that tells us more about a noun or pronoun.

Adverbs 

Adverbs: a word or phrase that modifies or qualifies an adjective, verb, or other adverb or a word group, expressing a relation of place, time, circumstance, manner, cause, degree, etc.

Participles: A word formed from a verb and used as an adjective or a noun. In English, participles are also used to make compound verb forms.

Descriptive noun: nouns that are specific to the objects being described

Descriptive verbs: A verb is a word that's used to describe an action. Descriptive verbs, or “strong verbs,” are single-word actions that add to the illustration in the reader's mind, giving it a boost of color and energy.