Styles of Writing – Specific:
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DESCRIPTION:
Descriptive writing forms a part of most assignments, and in some ways it is the easiest of writing styles. On the other hand, it is easy to give too much detail and forget the underlying purpose of the description. You may need to:
- Be precise about methods in an experiment
- Give essential background information so that you can analyse significant features in more detail later on
Note the example below, from a cognitive psychology report.
Uses of description
You may be asked to:
- describe what happened – for example, outlining the main events in a history essay, or methods and results in a project report
- describe main features of functions – for example, different bodily functions in a biology essay
- summarise the main points of a theory or an article you have read – for example, in reviewing a book or in introducing the ideas of another author within an assignment.
Advice: study journal articles and other examples from your subject are to find the appropriate style for your subject.
Source: section on Descriptive Writing taken from Cottrell, 1999, The Study Skills Handbook, Macmillan Press Ltd.
Methodology
- Participants – There were twenty English first language speakers in each condition, forty subjects in all. These were matched for age and gender across conditions.
- Procedure – Each participant was tested separately. They were asked to indicate whether each string of five letters (such as yongt) presented on a computer screen was a real word. For real words they pressed the 'y' key on the keyboard; otherwise they pressed the 'n' key …
Description is useful and important. You must remember, however, that description is not enough, by itself. You are usually required to give some comment or evaluation of the material/issues/problems/theories you have described.
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