How To Write A Winning Descriptive Essay


A descriptive essay is one which you will be assigned at some point during your academic career. The descriptive essay is meant as a creative writing piece, one which challenges you to think creatively about a person, a place, a memory, a thing, and then describe it in detail to the reader utilizing all of the senses.

In order to write a winning descriptive essay, it is important that you improve your creative writing and avoid some of the most common writing errors that many students make. In doing so, you can ensure your paper comes out perfectly.

When you are writing a paper, you can follow these essential tips to make fewer errors and get better grades:

  1. Learn to recognize a complete sentence. A complete sentence is something that has both a subject and predicate. These can be single words or multiple words. That is why some complete sentences are just two words long, while a fragmented sentence, or incomplete sentence may have a dozen words.

  2. Learn to locate the different parts of speech. This includes:

    • A verb
    • A noun
    • An adjective
    • Ad adverb
    • A pronoun
    • A preposition
    • A conjunction
    • An interjection

    Learn to recognize each of these and how they are used.

  3. Learn how to differentiate between a phrase and a clause. A phrase cannot be a sentence, because it does not have a subject and predicate. “Behind the car” or “the large dog” are examples of phrases. A clause, on the other hand, does have a subject and predicate which means that it is independent and considered a sentence. For example: “I went behind the car before eating”

  4. Pay attention to the rules for how commas are used. You use a comma:

    • In a series
    • When there are two or more adjectives right in a row
    • When you are quoting someone
    • When you are placing an interrupting word or introductory word in your sentence
    • For negation
    • To separate two independent clauses which are connected by a conjunction
    • Following a dependent clause which starts a new sentence

  5. Learn to recognize the most commonly mixed up words. Some are more easily mixed compared to others, but everyone has something with which they struggle, so make sure you can differentiate between:

    • then and than
    • to, two and too
    • accept and except
    • their, there,  and they’re
    • your and you’re
 
 
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