Student’s writing is not descriptive enough.

This is perhaps an even more common problem than being too wordy. I hear from parents often that their child, while full of ideas, doesn’t know how to put them down on paper. One of the most reliable pieces of writing advice I share with students is this: you must use specific, concrete language to show your ideas, not tell them.

Showing is more powerful than telling in writing, but also in life, wouldn’t we agree? For a child to tell her parents that she loves them is a beautiful sentiment, but for the child to show the parent she loves them (by making them a meal, buying them a gift, spending quality time with them) is altogether more striking.

Same with writing. I tell my students that the only way to transport the reader into your story, or poem, or essay — to really let them travel without leaving their seat — is to rely on language that shows, not tells. To turn one’s writing into a movie in the reader’s mind, students should use sensory details in their work: what does it look like? feel like? smell like? taste like? sound like? Students should also use strong, active verbs and nouns — the building blocks of our writing — to bring their work to life.

As I mentioned in my last article, but it bears repeating, students need to ask themselves questions in order to create content. Questions like “What motivated the character to do this?” or “How does [my subject] work?” or “What do I think and feel about what happened?” Questions provide a forward momentum, since they need to be followed by answers.

For students who are still stuck in their essays, I urge them to let their emotions guide them into analysis. What excites or scares you most about the book you just read, or the subject you’re writing about? This is a good starting point. (Analysis, after all, is asking ambitious questions and answering them with precise written language.) Writing is a difficult balancing act between concision and description — that is, between omitting unnecessary words and writing with detail. A student’s instincts will sharpen the more they read and write. In the end, here’s a rule I live by: A sentence fails if it doesn’t let the reader see a clear image and feel a strong emotion.