Sample Descriptive Essay

A Person Who Influenced Me in My Youth

Helpful Hints for your Descriptive Essay Rewrite

Due: WED JUN 16

I was talking to Elizabeth Luseni today at her Professor Conference about rewriting her Descriptive Essay on the topic of an influential uncle. Elizabeth had done a lovely job in her first draft of explaining how much her uncle had contributed to her personality by being such a powerful adult during her youth. But that was just the problem; Elizabeth was explaining about her uncle instead of describing her uncle.

BUILDING CHARACTER THROUGH BEHAVIOR
I hadn’t done a good enough job of explaining to Elizabeth the importance of building character through behavior. I’d like to rectify that failing here and now.

ONLY THE ESSENTIAL DETAILS
These Descriptive Essays need to place your readers in the presence of an influential person, and that means showing us how the person looks and behaves. Physical description can be brief and breezy as long as it is vivid. In her essay, Elizabeth’s uncle stands straight and tall, with excellent posture. Women are attracted to him, but he has no time for them. And that is all she needs to say about his physicality, as far as I’m concerned. I understood what those few physical details mean about his character.

EVERYTHING TANGIBLE, NOTHING ABSTRACT
But that was the last time the uncle appeared in the essay. In the rest of her paragraphs, Elizabeth’s uncle was an abstraction. I was told that he was a disciplinarian, that he valued time and effort, and that he deliberately attempted to mold the behavior of children. Those are fine characteristics to help build a character, but they need to be shown. I need to watch the uncle discipline. I need to see how he spends his time. I need to watch him interact with children.

In the sample essay that follows, I’ve tried to demonstrate how to build character through behavior.

Reliable as the Mail

          I know it sounds ridiculous, but the adult who influenced my youth more than any family member was the mailman I spoke to only once. Where I grew up, reliability was not common, but the mail came six days a week as regular as daybreak, just about the time I got home from school. I don’t even know his name, the man I could always count on to come striding down the block with news from the world, but now that I think about it, he must have known mine, and everyone else’s, up and down the street.

          Not that we received a lot of mail from exotic corners of the globe, but the mailman didn’t seem to care what he carried to our door, as long as it was addressed to us. With his long-legged stride, he covered a sidewalk square with almost every step, always steady, always smooth, whistling as he walked. I couldn’t have done it in the wind, the rain, the killing heat of summer, and no man I knew well would have done it either. But the mailman always delivered.

          His job was not heroic except in that small way that coming through on a promise is heroic. One day, though, he did something that made him a giant in my eyes. Mister Washington’s massive black attack dog came crashing off the porch next door and bounded right toward the mailman like a locomotive. The mailman set his bag down on the sidewalk and ran directly at the beast with his arms raised and barking! The scariest animal I had ever seen turned into a whimpering puppy and retreated beneath the porch.

          The day the mailman spoke to me, I knew somebody in the world was watching out for my small life. I had started a lousy after-school job at the newspaper plant, mostly just cleaning up, to help my Mom out with the bills. Frankly, it embarrassed me to be seen coming out of the place, my job was so shameful. But the mailman recognized the envelope addressed to me as a pay envelope. As he put it in my hand there at the front door, he said, “Somebody’s growing up and pulling his weight!” and gave me a little wink. It was as close as anyone ever came to calling me a man at that age.

          I’ve backed down a lot of bad dogs since then, mostly the two-legged type, and collected a lot of puny paychecks. It doesn’t seem to bother me, as long as I pay my bills. I won’t go far in life, I guess. I’ll probably never move out of the neighborhood, but I take some pride in walking a straight line most of the time and being reliable, as regular as the mail.