Descriptive Essay Help?

Question

So I have to write a descriptive essay on an experience I have had.

I was thinking about doing it on the African Lion Safari. (Its a place where your in a car and you see real wild animals and they come on your car and stuff).

So I need help on how to organize it and like how many paragraphs and stuff.

I have never written a descriptive essay so please tell me how!

THANKS

Answer 1

Make a rough draft with a time line of what happened 1st, 2nd, 3rd est.

Keep in mind the who was there, what was there, where it took place, how you felt during the experience, A good thesaurus can help you with a more polished and descriptive version based on the first draft. Keep in mind that a beginning (introduction), middle (primary information), and end (conclusion) makes a good story.  

Answer 2

Descriptive means describe. You can use your senses and emotions to describe.  You might want to begin with when you first get to the park and then continue in order of what you saw, felt, heard, smelt, and tasted (if it applies) as you continued through the park.

Answer 3

Essays should be five paragraphs long.  The first paragraph should have a thesis statement which states the purpose of the essay WITHOUT saying, "The purpose of my essay is..."    An example might be:  There is nothing more exciting and informative than a drive through the African Lion Safari in Kenya (or wherever it is).      Your first paragraph would give a general overview of the topics you'll be discussing.  For example:  The safari enables visitors to see the way animals live in the wild.  In addition, it allows people to escape from civilization for a few hours to see what life is like outside the confines of the cities and the suburbs.  This first-hand experience of the animal kingdom provides an education that could never be obtained from books.  

   Each one of those details (the ability to see the animals in their habitats, escape from civilization, educational value) would be discussed in more detail in the paragraphs to follow.  (Each detail would get its own paragraph).  So far, that makes four paragraphs.  The fifth paragraph would be the conclusion, which summarizes your essay.

    That's about it!

Answer 4

You need to kind of think about what you want to accomplish with this essay, besides just completing an assignment. That'll help you figure out how to organize it. As for the details, I think you'll find that my suggestions are to do things you already kind of knew.

The other thing you need to do is review what your instructor means by a descriptive essay. It is possible that my idea of a descriptive essay is a bit different from your instructor's idea, so...

For me a descriptive essay is different from one that is meant to be persuasive, or one that is supposed to teach, etc, in that it is supposed to convey your impressions of something so that readers can share in those impressions.

I'd start by introducing the topic in some fashion, to give my reader an idea of what is coming up, and provide a hook to generate interest. "I only ever once was really frightened in my entire life, and that was when my mother and I travelled to the top of the Zugspitze, Germany's highest mountain," is an example of what I mean.

But you don't need to do it that way. Many travel writers don't. Instead, they just sort of summarize what they're about to describe. And most stories (fiction or otherwise) just launch into things. In either case the writer has to assume that the readers are there for a reason, and the writer doesn't have to whet their appetites.

You go on from there to the description itself. If your describing an experience I think it's best to tell it in the order that it happened, without jumping back and forth, but maybe sometimes a jump ahead or a look back is needed. You need to use you judgment there. Other descriptions (of a technical process, of a painting, of a person) might require different organization. That can be quite challenging.

If you planned on having a high point to the description, you'll want to pace things so that it happens near the end. If it's more essayish, and there's no high point to it (like most descriptions, I guess) then pacing is less important than making sure that you don't spend a lot of ink on the boring bits and concentrate on stuff that's interesting.

You finish things off by briefly summarizing things. A descriptive essay of a picture would use a different kind of summary than a descriptive essay of a walk through a garden, of course, and an experience that has a fixed point in time (a few days of your life) as opposed to something that doesn't (a chemical process) would require different summaries. A summary should fix important points of your essay in the reader's mind, as you probably know.

I hope that gives you something to start with.