IGCSE Descriptive Essay - The Abandoned house

Q1.
You are walking home alone when you notice signs of storm gathering around you.

Describe what happens and how you feel as you make your journey to shelter.

Black ominous clouds blanketed the naked sky, with a cluster of roaring eyes crawling in the open vastness. Deafening gusts of wind swept across the grassy plains; the dense, mossy foliage writhed in the murky darkness.

The wind lashed upon the skeletal palm trees in the distance, ripping off its fragile branches in profound lividness. The fearsome gale rummaged through the moor for its next victims. The torrential wind pounced upon my consciousness as I struggled to keep myself from falling. Thunder roared more intensely and I could feel the storm ready to pour at any moment. I could see the house clearly now; the smashed windows, splintered wooden doors, and a sea of wilting Hydrangea all over the lawn.

The house towered like a dormant volcano amidst the wilderness, surrounded by an aura of misty malevolence. As I slowly walked further, clouds of anxiety floated in my mind. Beads of perspiration were spouting on my forehead. I felt as though my paranoia had grown its claws and was clenching my mind.

The rusty, iron gate creaked loudly as I pushed it open. Rotten planks of wood lay upon the threshold like a corpse, shrouded by layers of soot and mud. Meanwhile, rain throbbed against the thatched roof and the echoing sound of water dripping broke the suffocating silence.

The ceiling was as dark as slate. A bulb tied to a grey rope hung from the ceiling, swaying sideways like a pendulum, fighting against the gushes of wind. The floorboards snapped from the pressure of my Wellington boots. I noticed a small coffee table sitting mirthlessly in a corner. Its surfaces were encrusted in mould and dried up leaves.

I could hear the barren, orphaned stretches of the moor yelping in utter desperation. The iron gate clanked against the pillars, which stood firmly like sentinels summoning their strength to fight back.

I wondered to myself; was I now trapped?

In the description of the sky, you said it was naked right? So how a naked sky have roaring eyes crawling about? If the sky is naked, then it cannot have crawling eyes. That is a contradictory description that does help me create a mental image of what you are saying. Yes, you can be exaggerated int he description, but you have to be realistic. The description should help create the mental image. So if the sky was naked, then it could have shots of bluish light flashing across it, since you are describing an oncoming storm

Naked sky + shooting lights = imagery

Lividness is not a word that can be found in the dictionary. You made up a word back there that again, does not help in creating an image. You could instead have written "lividity", which can describe anger as the wind rips the branches off. Remember, word accuracy counts. If you make it up or it doesn't have an actual meaning, it will not help your description as the reader will not be able to create a mental image for it. Torrential rain is more apt than torrential wind as a descriptive word in this presentation.

It is difficult to imagine you being sweaty in the middle of the rainstorm you are describing. You have to keep with the image you are building. You are not sweating, you should be shivering in the cold with your skin hairs standing on end.

Gusts of wind are what occur not gushes.

Look, I am ending up having to give you a vocabulary lesson in this case, I should not be rewriting this essay for you. All this exercise proves is that you are not good at descriptive essay writing because you do not have enough of a vocabulary to create mental images with in written form. You have to read more fictional English books and take note of how the writers describe their scenes. That will teach you vocabulary and proper scene set up writing. You should also read more English based comic books as these are always using descriptive words in their dialogues. That type of reading will definitely help you develop better imagery skills in written form. As of now, you have made a good effort, but you are far from achieving your goal at the moment.