One of the hardest parts of writing is perfecting the art of description. Adding vivid descriptions, or what writers call sensory details, is what brings the reader’s experience of a scene, character, or feeling to life within a piece of writing. But it’s certainly not an easy skill to master.
While students love reading pieces that contain these engaging descriptions, they often have a hard time creating and adding them in their own writing. In this blog post, we’ve highlighted a few ways to help you explain what sensory details are and get your students inspired to write more meaningful descriptions.
Sensory details are descriptive words used within a piece of writing to evoke a mental image and an emotion and/or sensation for the reader. When a writer uses rich, descriptive language that appeals to the reader’s five senses, it transports them into the scene. Not only does this help the reader become more engaged with the text, but it also increases their comprehension.
Think of it this way: have you ever listened to someone give a dull, monotonous presentation or speech? It was pretty hard to pay attention, right? At some point as they droned on, your eyes likely glazed over and your mind began to wander. Unfortunately, you probably didn’t take much—if anything—away from the presentation. You may not even remember what it was about!
In the same sense, if you read something that’s vague and boring, what happens? You probably either:
A: Get confused and frustrated.
B: Start daydreaming as you read.
C: Stop reading it entirely.
Writers who don’t include good descriptive words or imagery risk losing their readers because they can’t get a clear understanding of the characters, setting, or plot. So, when teaching your students descriptive writing, be sure to have them practice using vivid language and sensory details that will grasp their reader’s attention.
To give you a better idea of how sensory details add interest, emotion, and clarity to a piece of writing, let’s compare a few sentences that use vague descriptions versus vivid ones.
The second sentence does a much better job of engaging the reader’s senses. The readers might almost be able to taste and smell the mint ice cream or feel an excruciating brain freeze. This helps them relate to what the character is going through.
While the description in the third sentence does communicate a point clearly, it still leaves the reader with questions. What kind of dog? What kind of storm? The details provided in the fourth sentence allow the reader to visualize the scene much better. It also elicits more of an emotional response as you picture a massive, seemingly fearless dog cowering in a corner. This is why using sensory details makes such a big difference in writing.
Want your student to use better descriptions and sensory language in their writing? Try these four steps to help them understand how to come up with strong sensory details.
Our five senses help us experience the world around us. With your students, work through the following steps to develop words and descriptions using their five senses as a starting point.
Talk about why it’s difficult to come up with sensory words in this manner. As you share your story, help them grasp the idea that writing with your senses means taking time to see, hear, feel, smell, or taste what you’re trying to write about.
This is where the lesson gets fun. Gather some objects your students can experience with each of their senses, such as:
For example, let’s say you gathered some slime, a fork, and a rock to help them experience their sense of touch. Let children take turns closing their eyes and feeling an item. Remind them to focus only on the sense of touch.
Next, hide a bell, rattle, squeaky toy, or other noise-making items in a box or bag. Have students close their eyes as you produce one of the sounds. Then, make a list together of specific words to describe it. Try this again with the other noise-making objects.
Now that you’ve experimented with different senses of touch and sound, repeat this exercise to explore more senses.
A thesaurus is a writer’s best friend. Not only can this tool help your students find synonyms for repeated words and phrases that keep cropping up in their writing, it can also help them find robust words to use as sensory details.
Teach your students (or review) how to use the thesaurus. Then, ask them to look over their list of descriptive words from Step 2 and find a powerful synonym for each one. For example, perhaps they’d replace the word “rough” with “jagged,” “ringing” with “tinkling,” and “sour” with “tart.”
Once your students are done finding new words in the thesaurus, have them compare their list with the one they made at the very beginning (Step 1). They will likely agree that the new words describe the way an object looks, feels, smells, tastes, and sounds much better than the original ones, which will ultimately help their reader form a mental picture.
Now that your students have a collection of engaging words to draw from, invite them to create a poem or narrative containing sensory details! If you want to ease them into the writing process, consider starting with a descriptive writing prompt instead. Here are some ideas you can use:
Do you have a younger student? Try out these prompts to get them started with sensory details!
Choose from these engaging prompts to get your middle school student excited to write!
Does your teenage student need some extra help with sensory details? Here are a few simple prompts for them to practice.
Using sensory details is an incredibly important skill for students to master in order to make their writing more interesting and understandable. Hopefully, this blog post will leave you with some good takeaways to help your student enhance their descriptive writing.
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