Sensory Imagery

There is a wide range of vocabulary in the English language, but I know that there are not many related to our senses. Actually, these rare words are important in helping us write our essay (see previous blog post: First-person Narrative).

Firstly, when students write essays and inject direct speech, they would use it like "'...,' he said." or "He said,'...'". That is already outdated and we must use more creative words to replace this. Instead of "said", we can replace it with "declared", or "mumbled" if it is soft, or maybe "hollered" if it is loud. Some other words are "growled", "whined", "stammered", "snarled", "whispered", "ordered", "announced" and "shrieked". These are the common ones which can easily fit into normal contexts of narrative essays.

After direct speech comes the indirect speech. In indirect speech, we cannot directly express how the surroundings are, thus we must use figurative language and their tools to help us describe. We can use metaphors, similes and personifications for that fact. That helps to brighten up the language and make the text more intriguing and interesting. Mixing a type of sense vocabulary with a different one, will result in undescribable results if done correctly.

Finally comes the action words. In narratives, there is a lot of action happening, especially in the rising action, conflict and climax. We need to know the appropriate words and apply them so that we can depict the scene in a flow of words. These words can also be divided into subgroups like fast and light sounds and actions, deep sounds and heavy actions, breaking sounds, quick-ending sounds, unhappy sounds, blowing sounds and awkward sounds and actions.

Even in narrative writing, we need to use imagery to assist us in bringing out the flavor of the essay, giving the reader a good feeling about the writing.

(Term 1 Post #6)