When writers use sensory description to describe animals, people, or scenes, they usually rely on the sense of sight more than the other senses. In general, our vocabulary for reporting what we see is larger and more varied than our vocabulary for reporting other sense impressions. Nevertheless, writers can detail the qualities and attributes of nonvisual sensations—the loudness or tinniness or rumble of an engine, for instance. They can also use comparing to help readers imagine what something sounds, feels, smells, or tastes like.

Describe what you saw.

When people describe what they see, they identify the objects in their field of vision. Here are two brief examples of visual description:

On Christmas Eve I saw that my mother had outdone herself in creating a strange menu. She was pulling black veins out of the backs of fleshy prawns. The kitchen was littered with appalling mounds of raw food: A slimy rock cod with bulging eyes that pleaded not to be thrown into a pan of hot oil. Tofu, which looked like stacked wedges of rubbery white sponges. A bowl soaking dried fungus back to life. A plate of squid, their backs crisscrossed with knife markings so they resembled bicycle tires.

— AMY TAN, “Fish Cheeks”

She was thirty-four. She wore a white skirt and yellow sweater and a thin gold necklace, which she held in her fingers, as if holding her own reins, while waiting for children to answer. Her hair was black with a hint of Irish red. It was cut short to the tops of her ears, and swept back like a pair of folded wings. She had a delicate cleft chin, and she was short—the children’s chairs would have fit her. . . . Her hands kept very busy. They sliced the air and made karate chops to mark off boundaries. They extended straight out like a traffic cop’s, halting illegal maneuvers yet to be perpetrated. When they rested momentarily on her hips, her hands looked as if they were in holsters.

— TRACY KIDDER, Among Schoolchildren

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Describe what you heard.

In reporting auditory impressions, writers seldom name sounds without also specifying what the sounds come from: the murmur of a voice, the rustle of the wind, the squeak of a hinge, the sputter of an engine. Onomatopoeia is the term for names of sounds that echo the sounds themselves: squeak, murmur, hiss, boom, plink, tinkle, twang, jangle, rasp, chirr. Sometimes writers make up words like sweesh and cara-wong to imitate sounds they wish to describe. Qualitative words like powerful and rich as well as relative terms like loud and low often specify sounds further. For detailing sounds, writers sometimes use the technique called synesthesia, applying words commonly used to describe one sense to another, such as describing sounds as sharp and soft; they sometimes also use simile or metaphor to compare one sound to another.

To write about the sounds along Manhattan’s Canal Street, Ian Frazier uses many of these describing and naming techniques:

The traffic on Canal Street never stops. It is a high-energy current jumping constantly between the poles of Brooklyn and New Jersey. It hates to have its flow pinched in the density of Manhattan, hates to stop at intersections. Along Canal Street, it moans and screams. Worn brake shoes of semitrucks go “Ooohhhh nooohhhh” at stoplights, and the sound echoes in the canyons of warehouses and Chinatown tenements. People lean on their horns from one end of Canal Street to the other. They’ll honk nonstop for ten minutes at a time, until the horns get tired and out of breath. They’ll try different combinations: shave-and-a-hair-cut, long-long-long, short-short-short-long. Some people have musical car horns; a person purchasing a musical car horn seems to be limited to a choice of four tunes—“La Cucaracha,” “Theme from The Godfather,” “Dixie,” and “Hava Nagila.”

— IAN FRAZIER, “Canal Street”

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Describe what you smelled.

The English language has a meager stock of words to express the olfactory sense. In addition to the word smell, fewer than a dozen commonly used nouns name this sensation: odor, scent, vapor, fume, aroma, fragrance, perfume, bouquet, stench, and stink. Although there are other, rarer words like fetor and effluvium, few writers use them, probably for fear that their readers will not know them. Few verbs describe receiving or sending odors—smell, sniff, waft—but a fair number of detailing adjectives are available: redolent, pungent, aromatic, perfumed, stinking, musty, rancid, putrid, rank, fetid, malodorous, foul, acrid, sweet, and cloying.

Here is an example of how Amanda Coyne, in her essay in Chapter 3, uses smell in a description:

Occasionally, a mother will pick up her present and bring it to her nose when one of the bearers of the single flower—her child—asks if she likes it. . . . But most of what is being smelled today is the children themselves. While the other adults are plunking coins into the vending machines, the mothers take deep whiffs from the backs of their children’s necks, or kiss and smell the backs of their knees, or take off their shoes and tickle their feet and then pull them close to their noses. They hold them tight and take in their own second scent—the scent assuring them that these are still their children and that they still belong to them.

—AMANDA COYNE, “The Long Good-Bye: Mother’s Day in Federal Prison”

In addition to using smell as a verb, Coyne describes the repeated action of bringing the object being smelled to the nose, an act that not only signifies the process of smelling but also underscores its intimacy. To further emphasize intimacy, Coyne connects smelling with other intimate acts of kissing, tickling, pulling close, and holding tight.

Because she is not describing her own experience of smell, Coyne does not try to find words to evoke the effect the odor has on her. In the next passage, however, Frank Conroy uses comparing in addition to naming and detailing to describe how the smell of flowers affected him:

The perfume of the flowers rushed into my brain. A lush aroma, thick with sweetness, thick as blood, and spiced with the clear acid of tropical greenery.

— FRANK CONROY, Stop-Time

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Naming the objects from which smells come can also be very suggestive:

The odor of these houses was different, full of fragrances, sweet and nauseating. On 105th Street the smells were of fried lard, of beans and car fumes, of factory smoke and home-made brew out of backyard stills. There were chicken smells and goat smells in grassless yards filled with engine parts and wire and wood planks, cracked and sprinkled with rusty nails. These were the familiar aromas: the funky earth, animal and mechanical smells which were absent from the homes my mother cleaned.

— LUIS J. RODRIGUEZ, Always Running: Gang Days in L.A.

Describe tactile sensations.

Relatively few nouns and verbs name tactile sensations besides words like touch, feel, tickle, brush, scratch, sting, itch, and tingle. Probably as a consequence, writers describing the sense of touch tend not to name the sensation directly or even to report the act of feeling. Nevertheless, a large stock of words describes temperature (hot, warm, mild, tepid, cold, arctic), moisture content (wet, dry, sticky, oily, greasy, moist, crisp), texture (gritty, silky, smooth, crinkled, coarse, soft, leathery), and weight (heavy, light, ponderous, buoyant, feathery). Read the following passages with an eye for descriptions of touch:

A small slab of roughly finished concrete offered a place to stand opposite a square of tar from which a splintered tee protruded.

— WILLIAM RINTOUL, “Breaking One Hundred”

The earth was moldy, a dense clay. No sun had fallen here for over two centuries. I climbed over the brick retaining wall and crawled toward the sound of the kitten. As I neared, as it sensed my presence was too large to be its mother, it went silent and scrabbled away from the reach of my hand. I brushed fur, though, and that slight warmth filled me with what must have been a mad calm because when the creature squeezed into a bearing wall of piled stones, I inched forward on my stomach.

— LOUISE ERDRICH, “Beneath the House”

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Here is an example of a writer recalling a childish fantasy of aggression toward her younger sister. Notice the tactile description she uses:

She was baby-soft. I thought that I could put my thumb on her nose and push it bonelessly in, indent her face. I could poke dimples into her cheeks. I could work her face around like dough.

— MAXINE HONG KINGSTON, “The Quiet Girl”

Describe flavors.

Other than taste, savor, and flavor, few words name gustatory sensations directly. Certain words do distinguish among types of tastes—sweet (saccharine, sugary, cloying); sour (acidic, tart); bitter (acrid, biting); salty (briny, brackish)—and several other words describe specific tastes (piquant, spicy, pungent, peppery, savory).

In the following passage, M. F. K. Fisher describes the surprisingly “delicious” taste of tar:

Tar with some dust in it was perhaps even more delicious than dirty chips from the iceman’s wagon, largely because if we worked up enough body heat and had the right amount of spit we could keep it melted so that it acted almost like chewing gum, which was forbidden to us as vulgar and bad for the teeth and in general to be shunned. Tar was better than anything ever put out by Wrigley and Beechnut, anyway. It had a high, bright taste. It tasted the way it smelled, but better.

— M. F. K. FISHER, “Prejudice, Hate, and the First World War”

Fisher tries to evoke the sense of taste by comparing tar that acted like chewing gum to actual Wrigley and Beechnut chewing gum. More surprisingly, she compares the taste of tar to its smell.

Ernest Hemingway, in a more conventional passage, tries to describe taste primarily by naming the foods he consumed and giving details that indicate the intensity and quality of the tastes:

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As I ate the oysters with their strong taste of the sea and their faint metallic taste that the cold wine washed away, leaving only the sea taste and the succulent texture, and as I drank their cold liquid from each shell and washed it down with the crisp taste of the wine, I lost the empty feeling and began to be happy and to make plans.

— ERNEST HEMINGWAY, A Moveable Feast

Writers often use words like juicy, chewy, and chunky to evoke both the taste and the feel of food in the mouth.