descriptive language examples

My Uber driver looked like a deflating airbag and sounded like talk radio on repeat.
The heavy metal band Opeth uses vivid descriptive writing to evoke loneliness in their song “Windowpane.”

The best way to expand our adjectival knowledge is to pick up a book and read. In the meantime, let’s prime the pump with this list of adjectives:
That’s why it’s important to build an arsenal of adjectives and adverbs. With that kind of knowledge, you’ll be able to pick the right one at the right time.

Personification is an effective literary device for giving lifelike detail to an inanimate object or an animal, and Carter uses it to great effect. Look at how much time she spends on the discussions of what the cat takes pride in (or doesn’t) and how it comes across in his attitude, with being finicky and jealous, acting to humiliate by spraying, and just overall behaving obnoxiously. Still, she conveys her clear affection for the cat, something to which many readers can relate.
In their own way, each of the following writers (three of them students, two of them professional authors) have selected a belonging or a place that holds special meaning to them. After identifying that subject in a clear topic sentence, they proceed to describe it in detail while explaining its personal significance.

An important element of writing descriptive sentences is context. If your point-of-view (POV) character is a child, for example, think about:
Instead of lofty abstract nouns, it’s often more effective to find a specific image, from a specific setting, as a specific character sees (or hears/smells/tastes/touches) it.

You can identify descriptive language by carefully examining the context it is used in. Any time the subject, verb or object is being modified in a descriptive fashion, it is considered descriptive language. There are also clues within the words themselves. Adverbs generally end with the letters “ly.” While this is most often the case, there are some words that do not follow this format. For example, the words “after,” “often” and “seldom” are all examples of adverbs that do not end in “ly.”
Some commonly seen forms of descriptive language are adverbs, adjectives, metaphors and similes. Adverbs are descriptive words that describe a verb. Instead of saying, for example, “The girl drank the juice,” you could instead say “The girl hurriedly drank the juice.” This adds importance and purpose to what the girl is doing, as well as helping the reader conjure a visual of what the action might entail. Adjectives are similar in that the describe a noun. Metaphors and similes are both methods of making comparisons. In the case of the simile, these comparisons are made using words like “like” or “as.” For example, “He ran the track like a fox.” A metaphor would say “He was a fox on the track.”

References:

http://grammar.yourdictionary.com/word-lists/list-of-descriptive-words.html
http://www.thoughtco.com/model-descriptive-paragraphs-1690573
http://www.nownovel.com/blog/descriptive-sentences-writing-rules/
http://penandthepad.com/descriptive-language-4572336.html
http://www.readingrockets.org/strategies/descriptive_writing