QUICKSTEPS                                 

                             to a short essay: Descriptive Writing     

Here is a brief lesson for writing a short descriptive essay based on the description of an ideal house. (If the slide show doesn't open quickly you can find it at 280slides. This lesson includes flash videos.)        

Be sure to develop your students' range of adjectives and words for emotions in pre-writing discussion. Also discuss building the description from the outside of the house to the inside, and alternatives for a walk-through. Which room is the most important? Why? What emotions/feelings do the sample houses elicit? Why are these important? (See the Tutorial in Constructing the Paragraph >5. Ordering Principles for some ideas on descriptive writing.)

Read/Think/Write also has some nice Flash-based applications for writing different types of essays. Take a look! (See >Writing and Publishing Prose, and >Organizing and Summarizing for K-12 students.)