19.1 Writing Sensory Details

Writing effective sensory details is difficult. When you are a little kid, you live in a world full of concrete objects and simple colors - "truck," "blue." One of the big projects of your parents and teachers is to think you to think in the abstract - to think of your destination, not the road itself.

Children learn this so well, and so rapidly their conversation become simply a catalogue of abstract ideas about experiences, culture, and relationships that eventually, their strength, the ability to think carefully about a bee sting or an ice cream cone or a doll becomes a weakness. Their talent for simply describing what they see, hear, and smell atrophies from neglect.

Effective concrete, specific, sensory details mark the good writer from a person who is merely intelligent and holding a pencil. A writer who carefully describes the sky recognizes how writing is fundamentally different from speaking, that the reader is not there with you.

So, we must relearn the concrete:

When describing something, we will write what I call a sensory detail set. This set includes the following:

Three sentences that each appeal to one of the five senses -- the recommended ones are sight, sound, and smell (note recommended, not required).

• Appeals to three senses.
• At least one comma-separated pair of equal adjectives.
• At least one onomatopoeic verb.
• No linking verbs, only action verbs. 
• One instance of figurative language - I recommend personification.

However, the most important criteria is the same as it always is - the sensory details set, like all your sentences, must support the central idea of your writing (the thesis for an essay, the WHO+WHAT+WHY) for a story.