The Sunday News
THERE is description in everyday life. Experts say every time you share a meaningful experience, tell someone the details of a beautiful sight, or explain why you enjoyed a book or movie, you use description. Similarly, whether you sit down to write a poem, about any subject, a song about love, a historical essay about the liberation struggle or a scientific report about various germs you use description.
Without even realising it, you probably use description — both in speaking and in writing — many times a day. What is description? Our senses enable us to experience the world around us. We can see beautiful flowers, a beautiful sunset, we can hear loud noise made by excited learners. We can smell the spicy aroma of fresh vegetables coming from the dining hall just before lunch time. We can taste the refreshing flavour of Mazoe Crush.
Description is writing through which we can share these sensations with others. Effective introduction includes sensory details that convey sights, sounds, tastes, and physical sensation — vivid language that brings a subject into focus. It also includes figurative language that compares its subject with other objects as well as logical organisation.
Many forms of writing include description. Other forms are purely descriptive. These forms include the following:
A description of a person, place, or thing may focus on the physical appearance or the significance of the subject. A description of an idea uses concrete images to show an abstract, complicated, or otherwise intangible concept. An observation objectively describes an event that the writer has witnessed. A remembrance of a person, place, or thing uses vivid details to capture a memorable part of the writer’s past.
The four functions of a sentence: Sentences can be classified according what they do — that is whether they state ideas, ask questions, give orders, or express strong emotions. The four types of sentences in English are declarative, interrogative, imperative and exclamatory. Declarative are the most common type. They are used to “declare” or state facts. Before we give examples of these types of sentences, do not get carried away by these terms which appear and sound complicated.
Understand the sentences in their simplest forms as demonstrated in the given examples: A declarative sentence states an idea and ends with a full stop or period. In our country elephants are mostly found in national parks. An interrogative sentence asks a question and ends with a question mark. Whose book is this? We are told that the word imperative is related to the word emperor. A person who gives commands.
Imperative sentences are like emperors. They give commands. An imperative sentence gives an order or a direction and ends with either a period (full stop) or exclamation mark. Most imperative sentences start with a verb. In this type of imperative sentence, the subject is understood to be you. For example: Follow the direction carefully. Watch out for snakes when working in that grass.
An exclamation sentence conveys strong emotion and ends with an exclamation mark. Examples: She’s not telling the truth! This is an outrage! Let us now turn to prepositions. Prepositions — such as at, by, on, and with — play an important role in English. They are used to relate words within a sentence. A preposition is a word that relates a noun or pronoun that appears with it to another word in the sentence.
Remember what I said when we discussed the parts of speech, that they are related and they will always crop up when we discuss other language issues. The following is a list of commonly used prepositions: about, above, across, after, against, along, amid, among, around, at, before, behind, below, beneath, beside, besides, between, beyond, but, by, concerning, despite, down, during, except, for, from, in, inside, into, like, near, of, off.
The list goes on: on, onto, opposite, out, outside, over, past, since, through, throughout, till, to, toward, under, underneath, until, up, upon, with, within, and without. Although most prepositions are single words, some prepositions are made up of two or three words. These prepositions are called compound prepositions. Some compound prepositions are spelled without a space between them, such as without, throughout, into, underneath, and outside.
Other compound prepositions are spelled as separate words as shown in the lish that follows: according to, ahead of, apart from, aside from, as of, because of, by means of, in addition to, in back of, in front of, in place of, in regard of, in spite of, instead of, in view of, next to, on account of, out of, owing to, prior to.
As stated before, these words are meaningless when used in isolation. We recommend the functional approach where they are used in sentences. By doing so learners will be showing full understanding of the prepositions.
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