essay writing prompts

In-Depth Guide To Selecting Descriptive Essay Topics

Choosing a descriptive essay topic can be difficult for many students. You need to select an idea that has several interesting qualities, as well as one that you can break up into several distinct parts and rearrange using your own original words that paint a picture that invokes some kind of emotion or vision from the reader. We’ve put together this in-depth guide to creating a thought chart to help you select great descriptive essay topics:

Start with a simple list of five or six possibilities

Start with some general ideas that are interesting to you. Often times an instructor will provide you with a list of prompts which can be helpful. But unless you are required to choose from this list you should always think ab out some ideas of your own. This will help craft an assignment in which your enthusiasm comes through in the writing.

Add descriptive headings like emotions or colors

Take your list of ideas and think about some characteristics that can be used as headings to further develop your topic. For instance, let’s say you consider writing about something that gave you fear and you are thinking about getting lost in the woods. Having a heading labelled colors might bring up green, brown, gray and black to evoke the fear you experienced and are now describing.

Put in your potential topics in the left column

If you could narrow down your topic ideas to 3 or 4 that would be great, but you can still add all of your original ideas along the left column starting with the one you preliminarily think is the most interesting and the one you believe you will enjoy writing about the most.

Fill in the squares and pick the most interesting

Start filling in each of the squares in the grid with a few keywords or phrases relating to each topic and your selected headers. If you have had trouble coming up with headers remember that colors, emotions, or some other descriptive adjective can be used to help you generate your ideas. The more squares you are able to fill up relating to a single topic the more you should realize that it is perhaps your best choice for completing the assignment.

Trying the above method should help you remove some ideas that you originally thought were interesting but find difficult to discuss in an essay. Just keep narrowing down your options until you have one great one to develop into your assignment.

#