Writing with Stardust: The Ultimate Descriptive Guide for students, parents, teachers and writers (32 page)

                                       LEVEL 4: ADVANCED PARAGRAPHS

Her
Amazonian figure
sat well on her
wafer-thin
body
. She had a
decanter shaped waist
and her complexion had an impeccable,
ochrous hue
. Her
pencil-thin eyebrows
eased down gently to her black,
beetle’s-leg eyelashes
. A sculptor could not have fashioned her
seraph’s ears
and
pixie’s nose
any better.

When she broke into a smile, her beguiling,
oyster-white teeth
lit up the room. It could jolt you like an electric current when that
megawatt smile
gave you her full attention. Filed to perfection, her
Venus-red fingernails
ran through her
nougat-brown hair
. Spools of it plunged around her photogenic face and hid
a swan’s neck
, elegant and smooth. I loved her nebulous,
Eden-green eyes
which were a-sparkle with the ‘joie de vivre’. They were like two beryl-green jewels melted onto snow.

Her
calamine-pink lips
tasted like rose petals. It surprised me that they were plump and
botox-boosted
as she had a
demure
, timorous personality. She whispered to me in
a dulcet voice
as sweet as any songbird. Her
voguish clothes
still kept captive an aroma redolent of cinnamon and
meadow-fresh mint
. It lingered in the room long after she had gone.

                 LEVEL 5: COMPLEX WRITING: BEWARE THE BEAUTY

Her hair was
as emollient as eiderdown
and was like
a loom of molten-gold
. It swooped past her
ethereal neck
, framing her
Slavic face
perfectly. She looked at me with her
lemur-round eyes
. They were seductive and
rhapsody-blue
. My heart nearly stopped when she gazed at me. Her eyes were
like
two plasma-blue gems slumbering in milky pools
. They were
a-smoulder with passion
and had a hypnotic quality to them. They were gleaming with an unearthly quality above her
concave cheekbones
and they shone with the faraway look of a star gazer.

Her
sliver-of-moon eyebrows
were burglar-black and stole my soul. If she had just batted those long and
languourous
eyelashes in my direction, I could have talked to her. I stared at her pouting,
silicone-enhanced
lips. They were
Aphrodite-red
and looked as sweet as strawberries. She had a telegenic look and a
statuesque figure
. It was comely to the eye and svelte and sultry. Her
sea-nymph ears
, tucked away in the glorious tresses of her hair, looked delicate and pared to perfection.

Her smile seemed fixed with fluorescent,
archangel-white teeth
. It was made more ravishing by her
uber-tan
. The summer sun had leaked in and burnished her bronze with its rays. I had heard that her voice was
as lilting and fluty as a nightingale
, but she never got the chance to talk to me. I didn’t want to stare at her anymore as she carried herself in a
ladylike
and genteel manner. Her
cosmopolitan
clothes
merely enforced my opinion of her. She was a gimlet-eyed paragon of pulchritude. What was the lesson I learned from that day? Never mix business with pleasure when you’re dressing a mannequin!

                                  SYNTAX 

Syntax is the way that sentences are constructed. The golden rule in writing is: KISS. This means Keep It Simple, Silly. That is the phrase I use the most with my students. It means that sentences should not be overly lengthy, convoluted or burdensome to the eye. Unfortunately, I broke this rule deliberately many times in the construction of this book! That’s because of the way the book is designed in a one-size-fits-all format. In some sentences, it was necessary to put in an extra word so that a fuller lexicon and variety of diction was available to the book’s readers. A typical example of this was in the ‘eyelashes’ section of Describing Females. The sentences underneath the grid are below.

1. Her eyelashes were silky over her acorn shaped eyes.

2. She had finespun eyelashes over her hazelnut shaped eyes.

3. She had languorous eyelashes
of feather-black
atop her walnut shaped eyes.

4. She had spider’s-leg eyelashes that fluttered over her grape shaped eyes.

5. She had Cleopatra eyelashes
of a lush, succubus-black
over her ungulate shaped eyes.

There is a syntactical problem with sentences three and five. It would be preferable to omit the words highlighted in bold. That would make the sentences less entangled and provide two images instead of three. The sentences would then look more presentable.

3. She had languorous eyelashes atop her walnut shaped eyes.

5. She had Cleopatra eyelashes over her ungulate shaped eyes.

A more pressing problem is the way in which text messaging has resulted in a form of pidgin English seeping into the work of students. It is no longer uncommon to be presented with a sentence that looks like this;

Wots up I said he said dat he was gud
”.

The only solution to this is to apply the same processes as this book does in order to stop the slaughter of our beautiful language! Rules of grammar and syntax should be constantly taught in order to give the students a wide base of knowledge from which to operate. Time and patience, allied to empathy about the challenges students face in the modern electronic world is required. Then sentences like the one below become commonplace.

“
Are you well,” I enquired? “I’m in good spirits,” he responded
.

                    
DESCRIBING MALES

                                                    
BLOND HAIR

LEVEL 1         LEVEL 2         LEVEL 3         LEVEL 4         LEVEL 5           OTHERS

1. He had
wavy
, Hercules-gold hair.

2. He had
mussed
, Nordic-gold hair.

3. He had
twirling
, Aryan-gold hair.

4. He had a
swirling
, lion’s mane of gold hair.

5. He had
whisked
, Apollo-gold hair that danced in the wind.

                                                   
SHORT HAIR

1. He had a crew cut and
darting
eyes.

2. He had a rooster cut and
piercing
eyes.

3. He had a marine cut and
penetrating
eyes.

4. He had buzz-cut and
gimlet
eyes.

5. He had a chrome dome and
far
-
seeing
eyes.

                                                   
EYEBROWS

1. He had bushy eyebrows and a
pleasing
face.

2. He had sickle shaped eyebrows and a
shapely
face.

3. He had equinox-black eyebrows and a
seemly
face.

4. He had hirsute, bible-black eyebrows on an
artist’s
face.

5. He had Hades-black eyebrows affixed to an
aesthetic
face.

                                                             
NOSE

1. He had a falcon’s nose and
merry
eyes.

2. He had an imperial nose and
joyful
eyes.

3. He had a patrician nose and
mirthful
eyes.

4. He had a raptor’s nose and
dancing
eyes.

5. He had a lordly nose and
come-hither
eyes.

                                                    CHEEKBONES

1. He had domed cheekbones on
tight skin
.

2. He had half-moon cheekbones on
tense skin
.

3. He had arched cheekbones on
taut skin
.

4. His pinched-in cheekbones rested on
skin that was stretched tight by exercise
.

5. His concave cheekbones rested on
skin pulled tight like a bolt of fine cloth
.

                                                              
JAW