Are you closefisted, or of frugal nature, or hold a generous attitude towards others around, or you are in the habit of spending your money lavishly? How are you like when it comes to describing your nature or disposition? Do you happen to be the aggressive or compassionate, chatty or quiet type, cowardly or brave, hard-working or lazy? Are you polite, serious, funny, silly, tidy, vain, wise, lucky, or unlucky?
When describing someone or yourself, you are actually helping your listener or reader create images in his or her mind. The description asks for a plentiful supply of adjectives and adverbs, while images cannot be created without using material nouns. Describing someone or yourself is an interesting phenomenon, though very challenging and cumbersome a job at the same time unless you enjoy a good stock of words and expressions to support your descriptions.
Look at a person with a critical view and then say how he looks when it comes to describing his physical appearance. Is he tall, small, medium, plump, bonny, skinny, underweight, or overweight?
What is his hair like? Is that short and straight, medium-length wavy or curly blonde? Or is he bald-headed with no hair at all? Look at his face now. Facial differences can even be found in identical twins. What is his face like? Oval-shaped, round, square, triangular, or the face is heart-shaped? Say something about his complexion by using words like fair, black, whitish, rosy, tanned, and dark. Using skin-related adjectives is also very helpful, like silky skin, smooth skin, creamy, pale, or spotless skin.
Description of eyes, too, is important when providing information about a person, and you need to concentrate on three things when picturing eyes. First, say something generally through words like ‘hazel-eyed’, ‘brown-eyed’ or ‘bright-eyed’ secretary. Second, show their size by ‘small’, ‘large’, ‘wrinkled’, ‘slanted’, and ‘almond-shaped’ like words. Next is eye expression for which you will incorporate words like: sympathetic, lively, twinkling, sorrowful, mesmerizing, tear-filled, etc.
Then you are required to describe the person’s clothing by dwelling on phrases like ‘elegantly-dressed’ ‘simply-clad’, ‘smartly dressed’ etc. Also concentrate on his mouth and lips, nose and eye-brows, the way he walks, the way he talks, the way he looks at you and others. You can draw attention to his voice as well.
The description is all about your being rich in vocabulary, and this is where the real problem lies. Hence, though hard and tricky a job, having practiced describing a few people, you would feel at ease. Why don’t you work on it once for all by managing to gather such vocabulary, and then describe a few of your pals? Take it as a project. Work on as many as six people you know well. Once finished, you will have mastered this skill more than seventy percent; I assure you.
