Descriptive Words

Or, More Importantly, Their Overuse

Hey everyone! I’m Abby, here again with another Tips & Tools article. This time, it’s on descriptive words. Or, more specifically, on the overuse of descriptive words.

Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash

I know what some of you are probably thinking. There are too many articles on descriptive words out there. But I'm actually here to tell you the opposite.

Don’t just change every “said” to a different verb. Don’t just add a bunch of description words solely for the purpose of adding more descriptive words. Don’t just describe every noun in the sentence.

Think about what words you’re using, and more importantly, why.

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I have four younger siblings at home. Occasionally, they’ll ask me to read their stories. And a lot of the time, their sentences end up looking something like this:

“Jim gazed longingly into Anne’s sparkling opalescent eyes as the fresh breeze whistled cheerfully through her flowing bronze hair.”

Whew! What a mouthful. Now, don’t get me wrong. My siblings are doing exactly what they’ve been told to do. That is, they are using unique descriptive words to spice up their writing.

But throwing a ton of random descriptive words and strong verbs in there isn’t going to help your writing. In fact, they’re just going to clog it up and make it much more difficult for your reader to understand.

The words you choose need to add to the message. Are Anne’s eyes important to the story, or is describing their color important to this scene? No? Then we don’t have to worry about adding so much description to them.

Here’s an example using the same sentence as before:

“Jim gazed longingly into Anne’s sparkling opalescent eyes as the fresh breeze whistled cheerfully through her flowing bronze hair.”

Let’s decide on one of the things described here. Which is more important, Anne’s eyes, the breeze, or Anne’s hair?

While all of these can be considered important to the story for different reasons, for the sake of this exercise let’s start with just one: the fresh ocean breeze. How can we rewrite this sentence, keeping the original message the same, but editing out some of the unnecessary words?

How about this:

“Jim gazed longingly into Anne’s eyes as the fresh ocean breeze whistled through her hair.”

And there! A more concise sentence that keeps the original meaning of the text while also making it easier for the reader to understand. We completely eliminated the descriptive words about Anne’s eyes and hair and kept the focus on the breeze by using a few descriptive words to describe it.

Now, if you wanted the focus to be on Anne’s eyes, you could rewrite it like this:

“As an ocean breeze blew gently around them, Jim gazed longingly into Anne’s sparkling opalescent eyes.”

Or if you wanted the focus to be on her hair, like this:

“The wind whipped Anne’s beautiful bronze hair into a frenzy as Jim gazed longingly into her eyes.”

And ta-daaa! We’ve transformed a clogged up sentence into one that gets the same message across in less words. Remember that these are just examples. With some sentences, or even paragraphs, it might not be possible to rewrite them this easily. But I encourage you to try!

In conclusion, while using descriptive words in your writing is great, there is such a thing as overusing them. I invite you, the next time you return to your current project, to take a look at where and why you’re using those extra descriptive words. Are you just adding them for the sake of adding them? Or are those details important to the scene? Could you maybe rewrite the sentence to be more concise while still getting the same message across?

Thanks for reading, everyone! As always, let me know your thoughts in the comments down below.

~ Abby