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Your first rough draft will be a description of a
- Person,
- Place, or
- Thing.
You will not be relating an event. That is a
narrative, the next rough draft. Also, do not write a
description of your room. One of our exercises involves that,
and I have read too many of those over the years.
Read over the Finding
a Subject handout. Do the exercises you find in it. Here
is how you prepare to write a desciption
- Begin with picking a subject. There are an infinity of subjects, and every subject is infinite once you approach it closely enough. Just think about how much has been written on baseball since the game was invented.
- Narrow your focus. The essays you'll be writing are comparatively brief. In order to go into sufficient detail, you'll need to have a narrow focus. Otherwise, the subject will be too big for you to go into sufficient depth.
- Generate a list of details about your topic. Make sure they
are
- Arrange them in a rational pattern.
Here's how you could narrow the subject of literature.
Literature
↳ English literature
↳ the Renaissance
↳ Shakespeare
↳ Shakespeare's plays
↳ Romeo and
Juliet
↳ the
character of Romeo
↳
Romeo's impetuous nature