How to Describe a Setting

• Admin
• April 15, 2023
• College Essays
• 259

by Michelle

At some point, an Essay Narwhal may find themselves needing to describe a setting in their essays. For prompts like ‘Why would you choose this college?’ (when you’ve had a chance to visit) or ‘describe your community and a problem you fixed in it’, knowing how to give readers a sense of place through your writing can be especially important.

An earlier post, Chewing the Scenery, does give several good tips in this area. You can combine those tips with the ones below, so you will know how to paint a picture of a campus or other type of setting in your writing.

How can you better describe a setting in your essay?

1. Describe small details of the location + an action
Besides using details like sights and sounds, to make the setting feel even more energetic, you may describe yourself doing an action in the scene.

For instance, you might bring up the sensory detail of humming sounds of laptops during a hackathon. When you include an action, you might mention how ‘I pushed aside the distracting electronic hum of a hundred other laptops as my fingers clicked over the keyboard. I prayed my addition to the code had successfully fixed the bug.’

2. Mention numbers
While you don’t want to end up with your setting sounding like dry tables of statistics, the selective use of numerical details can add to your description of a place.

You might see this method used before in nature writing, where an article might hold a sentence like ‘Every year, 3.7 million Adélie penguins waddle around Antartica.’

A student might choose to mention numbers for a setting like this: “I enjoyed listening to chattering sparrows as I made my way towards the lake. Then I looked at its surface with dismay. Plastic bottles, burger wrappers, empty cans—I later found out that as much as 200 pounds of litter were dropped in this park every year.”

3. Use the ‘zoom in’ / ‘zoom out’ method of describing a setting
A movie camera might start out from a very wide ‘zoomed out’ shot showing the vast sky and landscape, before the camera eye slowly zooms in closer and closer on the main character on screen. You can use this method as well, as in the example below:

Zoom-out view: “A cool breeze chased the clouds over the sky and the ocean was a blanket of blue.”
Zoom-in, closer view: “I could hear the waves lap against the sides of the boat, and the light ringing of a bell from a distant lighthouse.”
Zoom-in, closest view: “I had my binoculars pressed close to my eyes as I scanned the horizon, hoping to catch a glimpse of the whales that I had sailed out with this tour group to see.”

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