Alvina Lopez joins me today as a guest blogger here at In Our Write Minds. Alvina writes for accredited online colleges.

ONE OF THE most difficult aspects of writing is perfecting the art of description—the thing that really brings a scene, image, character, or feeling alive within a piece of writing.

While younger children often love using imaginative language, many struggle to find the most appropriate and engaging words to put down on paper. One of the best ways to engage students in descriptive and imaginative language is through the use of the five senses.

Try out this fun and simple lesson to help your students experiment with descriptive language that is unique and full of life and movement.

1. Discuss the Senses

It is through our five senses that we experience the world around us. Discuss with your students what the senses are and how they work. List the five senses and invite them to come up with examples of descriptive words within each sense category.

• Talk about sight, sound, touch, smell, and taste.
• Collect words from your students that fall within each category. They will likely suggest that something can look pretty or ugly, sound loud or quiet, feel hard or soft, smell good or bad, taste yummy or nasty.
• This is a great way to help them identify weak, unimaginative descriptions.

Talk about why it is difficult to come up with sensory words in this manner: Writing with your senses means you have to really take the time to see, hear, feel, smell, or taste what you are trying to write about. If you can’t experience the subject at hand with all your senses when you are writing about it, then your readers certainly won’t be able to either.

2. Experience the Senses

This is where the lesson gets interesting and fun. Gather objects your students can experience with each of their senses:

• Sweet, salty, sour, or bitter foods for them to taste
• Objects that are interesting to touch
• Noise-making items to listen to
• Fragrant or aromatic things to smell
• Objects that are colorful and interesting to look at

Let’s say you gathered some Silly Putty, a fork, and a sharp rock to help them experience their sense of touch. Hide the items in a bag or box. Have your children take turns closing their eyes, reaching into the bag, and feeling an item. Remind them to focus on only one sense at a time (in this case, touch).

It’s important that they only describe how the object feels (hard, sharp, pointed, cold, smooth), not what it is used for (you stab food with it). This will help focus their senses on the subject, and it will narrow their descriptive language to really pinpoint the attributes of that item. If extra help is needed, they may use word banks or a thesaurus.

Next, hide a bell, rattle, squeaky cat toy, or other noisemaking objects in a box or bag. Have students close their eyes as you produce each sound, and then make a list together of specific words to describe it.

Repeat this exercise with the other items you’ve collected to help them explore the other senses. Help them really zero in on one sense at a time. You and your students will be surprised and excited by the descriptive language they come up with for each of the senses, such as fluffy, icy, pliable, jagged, papery, leathery, or slick.

3. Use Descriptive Language in Writing

Once your students have recorded all of their sensory words and phrases, have them compare this list with the list they made at the very beginning.

Open up a conversation about why the second collection of words contains stronger, more descriptive language. Your students will surely explain that they were able to actually feel, see, or smell the thing they were writing about, so it was easier to come up with more concrete, specific words like downy or silky instead of just plain soft.

This is the lesson: If you can’t picture what you are describing in your writing, neither can your reader.

Now that the students have a collection of interesting, concrete words to draw from, invite them to create a poem or story containing descriptive language. What a fun and engaging way to help students “feel” their writing to create more illuminating poetry or prose!

Thanks to Alvina Lopez for joining us as a guest blogger. Alvina is a freelance writer and blog junkie who blogs about accredited online colleges. She welcomes your comments by email at alvina.lopez @gmail.com. 

CONTENT, style, and mechanics all play an important role in creating a strong essay, story, report, or article.

When we communicate on paper:

• Our goal is to be thorough, accurate, concise, and concrete.
• Our writing needs to flow well and make sense.
• We have to guard against misspellings and sloppy grammar, which can distract the reader and dilute our message.

Writers have dozens—even hundreds—of tips and tools at their disposal to make this process easier and improve chances for success. From time to time, I pick different ones to help you or your students plan, write, or edit more effectively. Here are six tips to try out:

1. Brainstorm Before Writing

The purpose of brainstorming is to plan ideas and jot down details to jumpstart your writing. Brainstorming can take many forms, including clustering, mind-mapping, lists, grids, and formal graphic organizers.

Instead of writing full sentences, it’s better to make lists of words and short phrases. Later, as you refer to your brainstorming sheet during writing time, your list of concrete words and other details will jog your memory and keep your writing from taking tangents. Brainstorming keeps you on track.

2. Use Different Kinds of Sentences

Try a combination of simple, compound, and complex sentences to add variety and improve the style of your writing. Here’s a helpful quiz on sentence types.

3. Choose Strong Words

Vivid, active, colorful words have the power to paint clear mental pictures and stir the reader’s emotions. When dull, vague, or overly used words clutter up your writing, replace them with stronger, more precise ones.

Dull: Isabella made a nice dessert.
Interesting: Isabella whipped up a rich chocolate mousse.

Watch out for boring words such as fine, nice, or good. Is it a good book, good friend, or good weather? Then express it more specifically.

riveting book, faithful friend, balmy weather

Avoid vague verbs such as cried, said, or went in favor of concrete ones:

The orphan sobbed, wailed, or wept.
Dr. Cooper ordered, whispered, or agreed.
The horse galloped, trotted, or raced.

Check to see that you haven’t repeated main words too many times, using your thesaurus to find appropriate synonyms.

Finally, when picking the best words for saying what you mean, don’t choose them based on how long they are or how clever they make you sound. Otherwise, you run the risk of sounding pompous or stuffy.

4. Include Subordinating Conjunctions

Sentence variations can add interest and maturity to any piece of writing. Using subordinating conjunctions is just one way to vary sentence structure, often by combining sentences like these together:

I shop frugally. 
I save several hundred dollars each month.

Example 1: When the subordinating conjunction begins the sentence, a comma follows the dependent clause.

Because I shop frugally, I save several hundred dollars each month.

Example 2: When a dependent clause beginning with a subordinating conjunction comes at the end of the sentence, don’t separate the two clauses with a comma.

I save several hundred dollars each month because I shop frugally.

Either way, you can see how using because to combine two short sentences results in a single but more interesting sentence.

If the term or concept is new to you or your students, you may find it helpful to print out a list of subordinating conjunctions.

5.  Watch Out for Misplaced Modifiers

Avoid pesky misplaced modifiers—phrases or clauses placed near the wrong noun. Make sure to position a modifier close to the word or phrase it should modify to avoid confusion.

Incorrect: Hiking along the overgrown path, a tree stump tripped Fernie. 

Why is this wrong? Because the sentence implies that the tree stump was hiking along the path!

Correct: Hiking along the overgrown path, Fernie tripped over a tree stump.

6. Revise Everything

Everyone’s writing improves with editing, so no matter how great you think your article or story is, let it breathe for a day and then scrutinize it for clarity, conciseness, concreteness, and errors.

Your Turn 

What’s your favorite writing tip?

Creative Commons photo by Claudio Gennari, courtesy of Flickr.

The Good

I love the deliciousness of certain words—the way something as ordinary as chocolate can take on an entire new personality when dressed up with adjectives like warm, rich, thick, gooey, chilled, creamy, or frothy.  

Such descriptive words bring everyday foods to life.

Magazine writers, cookbook editors, food bloggers, and restaurant reviewers all know the value of a well-turned phrase. Using appetizing words like simmering, hearty, robust, browned, and spicy, they tempt the reader to try a new recipe or visit an out-of-the-way cafe with enticing offerings like these:

The cake looked like a homespun masterpiece.  It was fluffy as a pillow, toasty brown, and shot through with plum-colored swirls. ~Serious Eats

This cream of mushroom soup hasn’t lost one jot of its butter-laden, cognac-kissed suavity. “Soup” is too prosaic a term for the pungent, earthy silkiness in every bowlful. Fungi beg for the honor of giving their lives this way. ~239 Best Dishes to Eat in Philly

Plump shrimp, sautéed with chile flakes and served with a salad of oyster mushrooms, cucumber and corn, turned out to be everything I wanted on a Saturday morning: fresh, vibrant and crunchy, with just enough spicy zing to wake me up. ~Salma Abdelnour, Best Restaurant Dishes of 2007

Broiling a nice juicy steak until it spatters and hisses and crusts up in all the right places is wonderful. Roasting a chicken and seeing the skin crisp up in the oven while the meat goes tender beneath is lovely, too. And most of the ills in the world can be cured with a few savory pork-stuffed dumplings, dripping broth and juice. ~The Wednesday Chef

I could marinate in these all day. Pun intended.

The Bad

Ah, but it’s also possible to describe a food—even one you normally like—in a way that totally robs the joy of eating it. Or to describe “iffy” foods like okra, black licorice, or liver and onions that are popular enough with some folks, but we just can’t abide ‘em.

One article, “Yucky Foods Worth a Second Taste,” tells why some people don’t like—among other foods—tomatoes. Given the description, I can understand why! To me, a good tomato is ripe, sweet, and juicy. But as the article explains, the “slimy, jellylike substance around the seeds, thin skin, [and] grainy pulp” send some people running from this salad staple.

Whoa. Almost had the same effect on me.

And last week, a friend’s Facebook status lamented the horrors of a recent fast food experience. She complained:

Just had the worst breakfast [I have] *ever* had. Ever. I love Sausage McMuffins and went for Burger King’s knock off. Imagine an English muffin soaked in artificial butter oil, toasted, assembled with a spongy egg-like substance, cheese whiz or something, and a sausage puck. Now, wait a few hours, microwave until completely indestructible, and serve to an unsuspecting consumer. It was malevolently bad.

Melanie’s description has had its effect. Off to BK, anyone?

And this description of how to eat raw oysters, though intended to set the novice at ease, sure doesn’t inspire me to rush out to my nearest oyster bar!

Stay calm when faced with a half-dozen to a dozen barnacled, irregular and slimy oysters set on your party’s table. If you’re an oyster eating novice, attempt to suppress the look of horror at not only the aesthetics of the shellfish, but how you’re going to manage extracting the oysters from their watery home.

And the Ugly

Then there’s just plain ugly food. You know the kind I’m talking about. Undercooked. Overcooked. Burned. Mystery meat lurking in an old margarine tub at the back of the fridge. An  unnamed vegetable  weeping at the bottom of the crisper. The leftover cup of grayish, congealed gravy. The stuff no one wants to—or should ever—eat.

Some people are experts at describing ugly food. In children’s literature, Shel Silverstein and Roald Dahl pretty much top the list. Silverstein’s poem “Sarah Cynthia Sylvia Stout Would Not Take the Garbage Out” contains some of the very best of “worst food” descriptions you’ll find! Adjectives like gristly, gloppy, withered, rubbery, curdled, and moldy perfectly describe food that’s, shall we say, beyond its prime. Here’s an excerpt:

. . . Prune pits, peach pits, orange peels,
Gloppy glumps of cold oatmeal,
Pizza crusts and withered greens,
Soggy beans, and tangerines,
Crusts of black-burned buttered toast,
Grisly bits of beefy roast.
The garbage rolled on down the halls,
It raised the roof, it broke the walls,
I mean, greasy napkins, cookie crumbs,
Blobs of gooey bubble gum,
Cellophane from old bologna,
Rubbery, blubbery macaroni,
Peanut butter, caked and dry,
Curdled milk, and crusts of pie,
Rotting melons, dried-up mustard,
Eggshells mixed with lemon custard,
Cold French fries and rancid meat,
Yellow lumps of Cream of Wheat. . .

It’s a fun poem! Hope you’re inspired to read the whole thing.

So there you have it—the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly of food description. Have I whetted your appetite for descriptive writing? If so, I challenge you and your kiddos to grab a food from the refrigerator, study it carefully, and come up with a list of words to describe it—for better or for worse. And if you’re brave enough, leave a comment sharing your lists with us. We’re hungry to read them!

. . . . .

If you’re looking for curriculum to help your students write more descriptively, consider WriteShop Primary Book C for grades 2-4 (or even older) and WriteShop I for grades 6-10. WriteShop I has a great lesson on describing a food, but both of these books offer several lessons on concrete description that will draw out the best in your young writers and make their writing sparkle with interesting, colorful vocabulary.  

Vigorous writing is concise. A sentence should contain no unnecessary words, a paragraph no unnecessary sentences, for the same reason that a drawing should have no unnecessary lines and a machine no unnecessary parts. This requires not that the writer make all his sentences short, or that he avoid all detail and treat his subjects only in outline, but that every word tell.

~William Strunk, Elements of Style

Conciseness boils down to this: expressing as much as possible without using unnecessary words or details. Concise writing is brief and precise, but that doesn’t mean it has to be dull and dry. Help your children apply some of these tips for more concise writing.

1. Stay on track

Staying on topic is a surefire way to write concisely. When your student takes tangents and rabbit trails, he loses his focus and ends up with cumbersome, awkward, or disjointed writing. Help him create an outline before he begins writing so that he’s less likely to wander off the path. 

2.  Be precise

The more concrete the word choice, the clearer the writing. Your child can be wordy and say “the shaggy gray dog with the long hair hanging in his eyes,” or he can simply say “the gray sheepdog.”

3. Use plain English

Many students mistakenly think that big words impress. In truth, effective writing uses simple, straightforward language. While a handful of mature, well-placed vocabulary words can raise the level of a story or essay, using too many can make a piece of writing seem verbose, over the top, and just plain hard to read. Unless you’re writing for a scholarly audience, don’t overdo the vocabulary.

4. Avoid super-long sentences

To train children to be concise, attach a word limit or try restricting the number of paragraphs and sentences they can use. This will help them say what they need to say in the space allotted.

When kids are first learning to write descriptively and use a thesaurus, the pendulum can swing wildly from three-word sentences to 20 or 30-word sentences. It’s okay to give them the freedom to play with words; they’ll find their center over time. Just know that you may need to gently correct if their zeal begins creating log jams in their writing.

5.  Don’t be redundant

Redundancy refers to extra words or phrases that should be cut out. Your student’s ability to write concisely will always trump filling a page with unnecessary text.

It’s not uncommon for beginning writers to repeat themselves. But such repetition bogs down the writing and makes the reader work too hard. Here are two ways to eliminate redundancy:

• Adding concrete details, facts, or examples instead of rehashing the same point.
• Slashing unnecessary words and phrases. Remember: when two words will do the trick, why use a dozen? Encourage your student to read each sentence and paragraph to see if he can cut out any words. His point will be clearer, stronger, and easier to identify.

“One of the cornerstones of powerful writing is the use of concrete details that can tell your story for you. I don’t care if you’re writing a sales letter, a blog post or a short story for The New Yorker, you need details.” ~Sonia Simone, Copyblogger.com

Concreteness transports us into a story like nothing else. It’s the key that unlocks the door of the reader’s imagination. If your child’s paper is vague and sketchy, what happens? She loses her readers and they come away without a clear understanding of the characters, setting, or event. Instead, her writing should contain specific, concrete details to hold her readers’ attention and give them a mental picture of the topics she’s discussing.

Choose Words Wisely

Concrete writing engages the senses. Your child’s descriptive and narrative writing should employ strong, colorful word choices that allow readers to experience an object, setting or situation through sight, sound, smell, taste, and touch.

Robust nouns and active verbs always pack more punch than weak ones that are simply preceded by a string of adjectives or adverbs. Not to say they don’t have their place, but adjectives and adverbs should boost—rather than define—the words they modify.

Search for Word Pictures

It’s fun to ask your children to search for descriptive, concrete passages in the books they’re reading, such as this excerpt from The Fellowship of the Ring by J.R.R. Tolkien.

Down the face of the precipice, sheer and almost smooth it seemed in the pale moonlight, a small black shape was moving with its thin limbs splayed out. Maybe its soft clinging hands and toes were finding crevices and holds that no hobbit could ever have seen or used, but it looked as if it was just creeping down on sticky pads, like some large prowling thing of insect-kind. And it was coming down head first, as if it was smelling its way. Now and again it lifted its head slowly, turning it right back on its long skinny neck, and the hobbits caught a glimpse of the two small pale gleaming lights, its eyes that blinked at the moon for a moment and then were quickly lidded again.

Notice how Tolkien paints a haunting image of Gollum as he makes his wily approach. Can’t you just imagine that scene in your mind’s eye? Can you see the thin padded fingers and toes and feel the cool smoothness of the rocks in the weak moonlight? Can you picture the secretive, insect-like prowler with the luminous eyes?

This passage from The Miracle at Speedy Motors by Alexander McCall Smith describes a different scene altogether:

Two days passed—two days in which more rain fell, great cloudbursts of rain, drenching the length and breadth of Botswana. People held their breath in gratitude, hardly daring to speak of the deluge, lest it should suddenly stop and the dryness return. The rivers, for long months little more than dusty beds of rust-coloured sand, appeared again, filled to overflowing in some cases, twisting snakes of mud-brown water moving across the plains…. The bush, a dessicated brown before the storms, turned green overnight, as the shoots of dormant plants thrust their way through the soil. Flowers followed, tiny yellow flowers, spreading like a dusting of gold across the land.

Powerful verbs—drenching, thrust, spreading—propel this passage along. Imagery of the river as a snake and flowers as gold dust appeal to the senses. The reader feels the quench of thirst and drought. Such is the power of concrete writing.

Your children can learn to write more vividly too. For starters, encourage them to:

• Recognize the importance of using specific vocabulary.
• Pay attention to detail.
• Add more description.
• Replace tired, vague words.

Introduce the Thesaurus

A thesaurus is a writer’s best friend (my all-time favorite is The Synonym Finder by Rodale). A thesaurus will help your child find synonyms for repeated words that keep cropping up in the writing. It can also help her find more specific words to replace dull words that contribute to boring prose.

And if you’re looking for curriculum to help your students write more descriptively, consider WriteShop Primary Book C for grades 2-4 (or even older) and WriteShop I for grades 6-10. Both offer several lessons on concrete description that will draw out the best in your young writers and make their writing sparkle with interesting, colorful vocabulary!

“Descriptive writing is an art form. It’s painting a word picture so that the reader ‘sees’ exactly what you are describing.”

~Brenda Covert

What’s the big deal about writing descriptively? For one thing, it’s much more than page-filling fluff. Descriptive writing imprints images into the reader’s mind, making you feel as though you’re “right there.” It‘s all about engaging the five senses of sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch to transport the reader and stir emotion. By choosing vivid details and colorful words, good writers bring objects, people, places, and events to life. Instead of merely telling you what they see, they use their words to show you.

Writers use this powerful method to make their pieces memorable—even brilliant—rather than dry and boring. In many ways, description is the most important kind of writing you can teach your children because it supports other reasons for writing such as storytelling, informative reports, or persuasion.

So even if your child never aspires to write stories or poetry, description is a wonderful skill to develop, for without it, all other writing falls flat.

Describing a Place

Vivid writing is especially important when describing a place—whether to describe a vista for a travel guide or flesh out a scene in a novel. 

Master storyteller Charles Dickens was also a master of using description to create a particular mood or idea.

It was a town of machinery and tall chimneys, out of which interminable serpents of smoke trailed themselves for ever and ever, and never got uncoiled. It had a black canal in it, and a river that ran purple with ill-smelling dye, arid vast piles of building full of windows where there was a rattling and a trembling all day long, and where the piston of the steam-engine worked monotonously up and down, like the head of an elephant in a state of melancholy madness. ~Charles Dickens, Hard Times

But your child doesn’t have to be a Dickens to add color, depth, and interest to his writing. Here, a ninth grader draws on all five senses to describe a place and set an effective mood.

Moist and salty, a chilly breeze blows in across the swells, bringing with it the pungent smells of seaweed and fish and making me pull my jacket a little closer. Sea spray transforms into fiery prisms as the waves splash against the shore, catch the last golden rays of sun, and toss them up like liquid crystals.

With a few tips and tools, your child can effectively describe a  place too.

Suppose he’s planning to describe a desert. He’ll need to describe basic desert features, of course: sand, rock, hills, and dunes. But deserts aren’t all alike, so his word choices will need to reflect the kind of desert he wants to write about. For example, if he chooses a desert in the southwestern United States, he’ll probably describe plants such as sagebrush, Joshua trees, yuccas, or saguaro cacti.

But if he’s writing about an oasis in the Sahara Desert, where vegetation is much different, he would instead describe date palms, oleanders, acacia trees, succulents, and desert grasses. His description of either desert scene will spring to life as he describes these places with rich and appropriate details.

Finding Vocabulary to Describe a Place

How do you help your child study his subject and choose vivid words that make his writing sparkle? Whether he decides to write about a desert, city, rainforest, or pond, these ideas will help him find words that will form the foundation of his descriptive piece, narrative story, or report.

Using a Search Engine

Search engines such as Google makes a great resource for inspiration. In addition to collecting general terms about the location’s flora and fauna (the desert, for example), he’ll also find concrete, specific nouns and adjectives that will add color to his writing. Suggest that he begin his search by looking up terms like these:

• desert landscape
• desert features
• desert climate
• desert plants
• desert animals
• desert description

What if your child wants to describe a city instead of a desert? City words are trickier to find, and he may have to hunt more. Try some of these search terms:

• describe city sights
• describe Chicago, describe Pittsburgh, etc.
• “describe downtown” (use quotes)

Using Other Sources

While search engines can lead you to a wealth of information, don’t discount the value of print media such as magazines and books, or digital media such as TV documentaries or DVDs about the subject.

If possible, visit the place in person. But if not, can you explore a spot with similar features? Many children are visual and tactile learners. If your child wants to describe what a sidewalk looks like, how about taking him outside to explore the sidewalk on your street? It will help him describe the texture, color, and appearance of a city sidewalk, even if you live in a suburb.

Expanding Vocabulary

As your child searches the Internet, ask him to keep an eye out for adjectives that describe desert or city features (or whatever place he wants to write about). Encourage him to come up with words on his own, but also to watch for words he comes across in articles or photo captions.

If he doesn’t understand some of the words, pull out the dictionary and make it a teaching moment! And show him how to use a thesaurus (we love The Synonym Finder) to find other words that say the same thing. Both of these exercises will help his vocabulary to grow.

Some Desert Adjectives

Desert: harsh, dry, arid, sparse, severe, hot
Rock: sharp, rough, jagged, angular
Grasses: windblown, bent, dry, pale green, brown
Sand: coarse, fine, glittering, shifting, rippling, sifting, white, golden
Sky: pale, intense, cloudless, azure, purple, crimson
Cactus: tall, short, squatty, spiny, prickly, thorny
Date palm: tall, bent, leather (leaves), frayed (leaves)

Some City Adjectives

City: active, bustling, noisy, busy, clean, dirty, windy
Traffic: loud, congested, snarled
Buildings: old, shabby, rundown, crumbling,  modern, futuristic, sleek, towering, squat
Buildings (walls): brick, stone, marble, glass, steel, graffiti-covered
Monuments, statues: stone, copper, carved, ancient, moss-covered, faded, green, bronze
Sidewalk: concrete, cement, slick, cracked, tidy, littered, swept
Paint: fresh, weathered, peeling
Signs: neon, weathered, worn, bright, welcoming, flashing
Buses, cars, taxis: belching, crawling, speeding, honking, waiting, screeching
People: hurried, bundled, smiling, frowning, eager, rushed

Use these suggestions to encourage your child come up with ideas for describing his own place. You’ll both discover that hunting for words can become a favorite pre-writing game! And as your child dabbles more and more with descriptive writing, I’m confident his words will soon begin to “show” more and “tell” less.

. . . . .

Do you struggle with teaching and grading writing? Does your child’s writing need a boost? Consider adding WriteShop to your curriculum choices for this school year!

The first seven lessons of WriteShop I specifically teach your teen descriptive writing. This important skill is then practiced in the remaining informative and narrative writing lessons. In addition, WriteShop teaches—and offers practice in using—a wide array of sentence variations that help to enhance a student’s paper with fresh style and vigor. When combined with strong, dynamic word choices, sentence variations give dull writing new life.

For younger children, WriteShop Primary introduces K-3rd graders to activities that widen their writing vocabulary. Book C contains three  specific descriptive writing lessons.

For more information, visit our website at http://www.writeshop.com/.

Announcing the Winners! 

Congratulations to our winners in WriteShop’s diamante poetry contest. With approximately 70 students submitting a total of 116 entries, it was really hard to select just four winners. My hand went into that bowl with much prayer!

The task of choosing my favorite of the four was even tougher! After all, I had to deliberate between fabulous adjectives such as blustery and timid; strong nouns like tusks, igloos, and frost; and amazing participles including shimmering, lumbering, and crackling. Wow!

In the end, though, I decided on Vincent’s Arctic/Desert diamante. First, I love his topic. It lends itself beautifully to a descriptive diamante. And not only did he choose each word with great care, he painted a dazzling word picture as well. So congratulations to Vincent, our Grand Prize winner, and to our runners-up: Gabriella, Hannah M., and Levi. Well done!

GRAND PRIZE WINNER!

Arctic
Blustery, desolate
Swirling, screaming, freezing
Caribou, igloos . . . Camels, tents
Burning, blinding, whistling
Barren, dry
Desert

 Vincent, age 13 (Indiana)

RUNNERS-UP

Elephant
Heavy, strong
Lumbering, trumpeting, spraying
Trunk, tusks . . . Whiskers, cheese
Scurrying, trembling, gnawing
Tiny, timid
Mouse

Hannah, age 13 (New York)

. . . . .

Sunrise
Pink, purple
Shining, shimmering, brightening
Dawn, light . . . Dusk,shadows
Changing, glowing, darkening
Red, orange
Sunset

Gabriella, age 13 (Washington)

. . . . .

Fire
Red, hot
Scorching, burning, boiling
Ember, flame . . . Frost, glacier
Freezing, crackling, chilling
Blue, cold
Ice

Levi, age 10 (Colorado)

. . . . .

Vincent has won a $10 Barnes & Noble gift card for himself and a $10 WriteShop gift certificate for his mom. Congratulations!

Runners-up will receive our brand-new poster! 

I hope you take a few minutes to read some of the other entries as well, for all our contestants gave their best. You’ll find some true gems, evidence of creativity, hard work, and time spent with The Synonym Finder! As a matter of fact, one mom emailed us to say:

“Thanks for having these contests. I love seeing [my kids] writing for someone other than myself and digging through the thesaurus!” —Theresa

Diamante: A seven-line poem that takes the shape of a diamond.

Lion
Majestic, proud
Roaring, snarling, prowling
Mane, muscle . . . Fleece, fluff
Bleating, leaping, grazing
Meek, gentle
Lamb

A Poem of Opposites

Remember that the first and last words of a cinquain are synonyms—the last word of the poem renames the first.

Diamantes, however, are poems about opposites: the first and last words have opposite meanings (or convey opposite ideas).

A diamante has seven lines that follow this sequence:

Line A: Topic A (must be a noun)
Line B: Two vivid adjectives that describe Topic A
Line C: Three interesting “-ing” action verbs that describe Topic A
Line D: Two concrete nouns about Topic A and two about Topic G
Line E: Three interesting “-ing” action verbs that describe Topic G
Line F: Two vivid adjectives that describe Topic G
Line G: Topic G (must be a noun)

Here’s another example:

Light
Clear, brilliant
Glowing, shining, revealing
Mirror, candle . . . Whisper, shadow
Deepening, sleeping, shrouding
Black, quiet
Darkness

Brainstorming 

Use the tips below to brainstorm on blank paper for different ideas. Then follow the directions to write your own descriptive diamante. Because the poem has a limited number of words, choose each word carefully, avoiding vague, blah words.

Opposite Word Pair Ideas

Correct: age/youth (nouns)
Incorrect: old/young (adjectives)

• cat/dog
• boy/girl
• hamburger/Coke
• pencil/paper
• sandals/sneakers
• king/queen
• fire/ice
• thunder/lightning
• earth/sea
• rose/thorn
• love/hate
• victory/defeat
• peace/turmoil

Line A: Name a topic (see the suggestions above for some ideas).
Line G: Name an opposite topic. (This will be the LAST line of your diamante.) Remember—topics must be nouns.
Line B: Brainstorm 5-6 vivid, concrete adjectives to describe Topic A. Do not choose words that end in “-ing.”
Line C: Brainstorm 5-6 highly descriptive participles (verbs ending in “-ing”) that fit Topic A.
Line D: Brainstorm several nouns that tell something about Topic A and Topic G. Be careful—make sure you choose NOUNS, not ADJECTIVES!
Line E: Brainstorm 5-6 highly descriptive participles (verbs ending in “-ing”) that fit Topic G.
Line F: Brainstorm 5-6 vivid, concrete adjectives to describe Topic G. Do not choose words that end in “-ing.”

Writing Your Diamante

1. Pick out your most descriptive words from your brainstorming and put your diamante together. Diamantes do not need titles.
2. When you are satisfied, recopy the poem onto clean notebook paper.
3. Center your diamante on the paper.
4. Begin each line with a capital letter, and remember your commas. Do not use ending punctuation.
5. Include three spaced periods in the middle of Line D.
6. When finished, double-check for concreteness!

Line A. _______
Line B. _______ , _______
Line C. _______ , _______ , _______
Line D. _______ , _______ . . . _______ , _______
Line E. _______ , _______ , _______
Line F. _______ , _______
Line G. _______

Diamante Poetry Contest! 

[Note: The contest has ended]

Here’s a contest for kids age 8-17! Post your children’s diamante poems in the comment section by September 17. A student may enter up to three diamante poems, but each must be submitted as a separate comment. Include the student’s first name and age with each submission. (You won’t be able to center the poem, but that’s OK.)

Eligibility and Details

• Submissions will be accepted between September 10 and 17, 2008.
• Winning diamante poems must adhere strictly to the format rules above. For example, if the student places an adjective where a noun should be, the poem will become ineligible.
• On September 18, four winners will be drawn randomly from eligible submissions. Our favorite of the four will receive the Grand Prize. The other three will win a free poster.
• Winning poems will appear here at the In Our Write Minds blog September 18.

(Edited: As students have begun submitting poems, I’ve noticed that many diamantes have contained errors in which students use adjectives when the instructions call for nouns. Up till now, I have emailed these students with the opportunity to edit their poems, but I may not always have time to do this. Please review your child’s poem first to make sure he or she is using the correct part of speech. I’d love for each and every poem to qualify! —Kim)

Grand Prize

• $10 Barnes & Noble gift card for the student
• $10 WriteShop gift certificate for the parent

Other Winners

• The remaining three students will receive an 8.5″ x 11″ poster.

. . . . .

Copyright © 2008 Kim Kautzer. All rights reserved.

Jane Straus, author of The Blue Book of Grammar and Punctuation, is back as a guest at our blog. Today, Jane has stopped in to give us some practical writing tips. Jane says:

“Let’s see if we can help you become a more effective writer by learning some tricks of the trade. These are stylistic ideas that can turn a dull letter or report into an intriguing one.” Continue reading →

Cinquain: an unrhymed poem consisting of five lines arranged in a special way.

Planet
Graceful, ringed
Spinning, whirling, twirling
Dances with neighbor Jupiter
Saturn

A cinquain is an example of shape poetry. Because of the exact number of words required for each line of this poem, a unique, symmetrical shape is created from interesting, descriptive words.

The word cinquain comes from the Latin root for “five.” Notice that the cinquain has five lines that follow this sequence:

Line A: One vague or general one-word subject or topic.
Line B: Two vivid adjectives that describe the topic.
Line C: Three interesting “-ing” action verbs that fit the topic.
Line D: Four-word phrase that captures feeling about the topic.
Line E: A very specific term that explains Line A.

Here’s another example: Continue reading →