Name: Build a picture with your words: 5 descriptive writing tools
Uploaded: 2025-07-29T18:08:37.000Z
Duration: 14 min 15 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

In today's video, I'm going to give you five descriptive writing tools.

Just like it sounds, you're going to be describing something or you're going to be describing someone or a place or a situation or an action.

So it's very important that you make it easy for the reader to basically understand what you're saying, and you're going to do that by appealing to certain aspects of his or her mind as he or she is reading.

Now, all of these things you can, of course, use in spoken English as well, but you can do a lot more in spoken English because you have your hands, you have your facial gestures, you have your body gestures.

In writing, you have to be very clear and very precise with your words in order to help the reader get that mental image that you want.

So, the first thing you're going to do is you're going to use a lot of adjectives and adverbs.

People don't use these enough when they're trying to describe things, and it's harder for the reader basically to relate, to have a sort of relationship with what they're reading.

Now, another thing you can also use is prepositional phrases, but you're going to be using these as adverbs and adjectives.

You can use them for other purposes as well, but I want you to start using more of these in your writing to help the reader get closer to the topic or to the subject.

You're going to use these to add visuals.

You're going to add colour, you're going to add shape, you're going to add size.

If you want the action to move faster or slower.

If you want the reader to slow down and focus, or if you want the reader to just read quickly and get to the next point, which is more important.

Now, you're thinking spice isn't food, same thing.

You don't want your reading to be very boring, just, you know, here's details, details, details.

You want to give it a little bit of excitement for the reader to keep his or her attention while you're giving him or her information.

There's a conference or a presentation, and the man who has the hat on...

And yes, it gives a bit of a visual, it gives a description, but more it's used to identify which man.

So, the man in the hat stood up to leave.

I know there's a man, I know he's wearing a hat, I know he stood up, looks like he's about to leave.

But that doesn't give me very much information as a reader.

So, first of all, I changed man to gentleman.

It's still a man, but I'm adding the adjective here, gentle, just making a different sort of connotation, a different subtle difference in meaning.

Now, basically what this does is give you a different impression of this man.

He's not a young man, he's not a middle-aged man, he's a little bit older.

So, older people have a different approach to them, a different view of them.

Has a rim, a brim, it's like in the top, and then it's a little bit tucked in.

You don't need to know, but it gives you a general idea.

It's a hat that an elderly gentleman would wear, for example.

So, the elderly gentleman in the fedora hat.

Plus, we also have a different impression of elderly men in hats than we do of young men in baseball caps.

So, right away I'm giving you a more detailed visual, a better description of this person, and your impression of the situation has to change because of it.

He's not very pleased with what's going on in the conference or the presentation, so he stood up a little bit angrily, intending to leave.

So, it's obviously he's going to leave, but right away I have a very different image in this sentence than I do in this sentence, just because I gave more details.

And notice here, in a huff, this is a prepositional phrase, it's telling you how he stood up, so it's an adverb.

So, prepositional phrases as adverbs or adjectives, or just simple adverbs and adjectives.

Now, number one, this goes very clearly, directly with number two.

Make sure that you're appealing to the reader's senses.

That way the reader can engage with the situation, with the topic, with the character, with the people being...

It creates a mental picture, and it allows the reader to relate.

So, the suspect's clothes were dirty, suggesting he slept outside or in the streets the night before.

So, okay, the suspect's clothes were dirty.

Okay, you think maybe he spilled some coffee on himself.

Suggesting he slept outside the night before, or on the streets the night before, doesn't really...

So, we want to give you a more visual, and we want to appeal to your senses.

The suspect's clothes were covered in brown stains and dust.

They had ragged holes throughout, and gave off a pungent odor of old sweat and garbage.

So, not just dirty, but stains, brown stains, and you know, we can guess where brown stains came from.