Descriptive Essay—Painting a Picture.
Each paragraph essay should be at least 6-8 sentences long or 100-200 words in order for you to demonstrate your understanding and mastery of the elements of good writing in the various forms of writing explained in the textbook. A simple description of the types of essays is as follows: Types of Essays Descriptive Essay—Painting a Picture Narrative Essay—Telling a Story Example Essay—Using Examples Definition Essay—What is it? Classification Essay—Putting in Groups Process Essay—How to do it Comparison-Contrast Essay—Same Difference Cause and Effect Essay—Reasons and Results Argument Essay—Persuade Me Here is an example of Descriptive Narration. Note its length. The Magic Metal Tube by Maxine Hong Kingston Once in a long while, four times so far for me, my mother brings out the metal tube that holds her medical diploma. On the tube are gold circles crossed with seven red lines each–“joy” ideographs in abstract. There are also little flowers that look like gears for a gold machine. According to the scraps of labels with Chinese and American addresses, stamps, and postmarks, the family airmailed the can from Hong Kong in 1950. It got crushed in the middle, and whoever tried to peel the labels off stopped because the red and gold paint come off too, leaving silver scratches that rust. Somebody tried to pry the end off before discovering that the tube falls apart. When I open it, the smell of China flies out, a thousand-year-old bat flying heavy-headed out of the Chinese caverns where bats are as white as dust, a smell that comes from long ago, far back in the brain. Now write your own, original example paragraphs of each of the following after you have read each chapter. You can choose one topic for all of the paragraphs or a different topic for each paragraph.
1. Chapter 7: Descriptive Narration 2. Chapter 8: Exemplification 3. Chapter 9: Analysis by Division 4. Chapter 10: Process Analysis 5. Chapter 11: Cause and Effect 6. Chapter 12: Classification 7. Chapter 13: Comparison and Contrast