10 Descriptive Essay Examples

The descriptive essay is the text intended to describe and make a complete and detailed analysis of a thing from a certain point of view, which can be of any nature, material or symbolic, of the natural world or of the imagination, whether they are events, landscapes, objects, real characters or fiction. For example: The character Jean Valjean from the novel The Miserables Victor Hugo is an honest, correct policeman, the representation of morality and justice.

In the descriptive essay it is important to explain point by point what is being talked about in order to cover it in its entirety. One could even say that the description it is a list or set of ideas that make up the whole object. That is why this kind of text You must use the most precise phrases and words to make the reader have the closest and most concrete image of the reality of what is described. The use of adjectives and other resources, such as rhetorical or literary figuresis key to it. For example: The novel love is forbidden

It is ninety-six pages long, takes place in Scotland in the year 1987 and tells of a married couple, Amber and Hank, who are experiencing a marital crisis.

• See also: Essay Types

Characteristics of a descriptive essay

The descriptive essay also includes a position of the author in relation to the topic that is being discussed, since his writing will start from the concepts and theoretical frameworks with which it is handled and with the knowledge that it has in its head. Since description is the goal of this type of essay, the text can have both a first person narrator, under a certain partial point of view, as in the third person, in the voice of a omniscient narrator.

The most notable characteristics of the descriptive essay are:

• Precision. The descriptive essay requires that the qualities and details of the object be specific, with the adjectives closest to reality and that accurately express the idea that is wanted to transmit. For example: The painting measures one meter and thirty centimeters high and fifty wide, it is done in watercolor over aged oil and has an ostentatious gold frame.
• Order. The descriptive essay must have a structure that is clear to the reader and that allows him to build step by step the object that is being shown or that is being talked about. For example: We start by talking about the materials with which the cathedral is built to then move on to the details from the inside. The rock was brought to the country directly from Rome.
• Exemplification. The descriptive essay uses the resource of comparison with similar objects or those that have similar features that they can build or graph in the mind of the reader with greater efficiency what is being talking. For example: The experience of zero gravity can be compared to being submerged in water, since there are no exact forces that propel the body in any direction.
• Subjectivity. The descriptive essay, more than having an objective intention, seeks to capture the personal experience of the author to establish certain guidelines or similes that work very well so that another understands what is being referring. Above all, it is an approach used when describing things that are either very symbolic or abstract like the love wave friendship. For example: Being in the presence of the Dalai Lama is a profound experience, it brings peace and the atmosphere is filled with harmony, sweetness and tranquility.
• tones.It has different nuances, which can range from comedy, nostalgia, drama, tragedy, emotion, among others. For example: The landscape of that beach was highly moving, its waves stirred the bitter calm of my being and the leaves of the tall palm trees, of a deep green color, were submerged in my retinas like bursts of a time past.

descriptive essay examples

1. Fragment of a descriptive essay on a landscape

From these heights it cannot be seen, but down there the waves advance, continuously, like an army in camouflage, to a destination far or near, barely breaking the perfect formation to spit out some foam. Come closer to the window and you will see, from time to time, the fleeting white flash, the bubbling presence of the crest of a disobedient wave, which breaks a little before its time.

• See the full article: Descriptive essay of a landscape

1. Fragment of a descriptive essay on nature

Nature is a natural environment, even if it sounds redundant: a place where the laws of the human being have not made its entrance yet and therefore remains intact, more or less as it has been throughout the centuries. We can find nature in any virgin space: a desert, an impenetrable jungle, the deep of the oceans or even in the countryside, as long as we know how to get away from the spaces intervened by the humanity.

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1. Fragment of a descriptive essay about a place

It is also the widest river in the world: 234 km at its maximum point, with an average depth of 13 meters that requires continuous dredging of the sedimentary deposits of the current. They move a year in about 160 million tons of sediment: silt, clay and sand since, otherwise, they would prevent the intense commercial life that the river gives to the many ports that have been founded on its shore: Colonia de Sacramento, Piriápolis, La Plata, Punta del Este, Puerto de Olivos, Puerto del Buceo, those of Montevideo and Buenos Aires.

• See the full article: Descriptive essay about a place

1. Fragment of a descriptive essay on the plot of the novel The assaultby Reinaldo Arenas

The novel is a dystopia that takes place in a state governed by a president named as the Great Reprimer, emphasizing that he is a person whose politics is based on repression. People live in large complexes called polyfamily, where beds are grouped for citizens. At the first bell they must get up and start work in the fields. They all have shaved heads.

1. Fragment of a descriptive essay on the choreography of Swan Lake

In the scene, a dancer is introduced, who plays Odette, the queen of the swans, and begins a solo dance that represents her own death. Its harmonic arms can be seen moving like wings, up and down, the body slides with melancholic movements that denote agony. The music is deeply sad, composed by the Russian composer Tchaikovsky.

1. Fragment of a descriptive essay on meditation

Meditating involves sitting comfortably with your back straight and your legs crossed in the posture known as Padmasana or lotus. You have to start the meditation with a gesture of gratitude and willingness, and concentrate on breathing. A mantra is helpful and there are many that are known to have spiritual attributes. One of them is om mani padme hum, which is pronounced: “om maní peme hung”, and is the mantra of Avalokiteśvara, the bodhisattva of compassion. It is repeated while keeping the mind concentrated on the inhalation and exhalation, seeking that each thought that arrives follows its course without disturbing the meditative moment.

1. Fragment of the descriptive essay Machiavelli, the art of the Stateby Juan Manuel Forte

There is a characterization with which Machiavelli's work has been repeatedly associated, which was forged already while he was alive, and which is best expressed in words by Guicciardini, in which he defined his friend and protégé as a man who was always "extravagant with respect to common opinion, and inventor of new and unusual”. Emblem, that of novelty, typically Renaissance; no less recurrent than the fascination for the unusual, for discovery.

1. Fragment of the descriptive essay on the world of wrestling, by Roland Barthes

There are people who believe that wrestling is an ignoble sport. Wrestling is not a sport, it is a show; and it is no more ignoble to attend a representation of pain in wrestling, than to attend the sufferings of Arnolfo or Andrómaca. Of course there is a false catch that is costly represented with the useless appearances of a regular sport; this offers no interest. Authentic wrestling, improperly called amateur wrestling, is performed in second-rate venues where the The audience spontaneously comes to terms with the spectacular nature of the combat, like the audience at a movie theater. neighborhood. Those people are outraged that wrestling is a fake sport (which, by the way, should release it from its ignominy). The public doesn't care at all if the fight is faked or not, and they're right; it trusts in the first virtue of the spectacle, that of abolishing all motives and all consequences: what matters is not what you believe, but what you see.

1. Fragment of a descriptive essay on The Tibetan Book of Life and Death, by Sogyal Rinpoche

The main characteristic of the realm of the gods, for example, is the absence of suffering; it is a realm of unchanging beauty and sensual ecstasy. Let us imagine the gods: tall, blond surfers who lazily spend their time on sun-drenched beaches and gardens, listening to the kind of music they prefer, intoxicated by all kinds of stimulants, absorbed in meditation, yoga, physical exercise and all kinds of methods of self-improvement, but never trying the brain, without facing any complicated or painful situation, without ever being aware of its true nature, so anesthetized that they never perceive what it really is his condition.

1. Fragment of a descriptive essay on Guernica, by Jose Camon Aznar

We arrive with Guernica, a large composition painted in black and white and gray in 1937, at the apex of Picasso's expressiveness. Like Goya in the disasters of war, Picasso symbolizes, more than a concrete fact of the Spanish war —according to what he himself has declared to the American journalist Jerome Seekler—, the allegory of the suffering and darkness of war, embodying the people in that howling horse that occupies the center of the frieze. It would seem that the entire previous path of Picasso has been the preparation for this explosion of rage.

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