Descriptive Writing Revision Strategies
Possibilities
for Revision
- Insert a snap shot
- Insert a thought shot
- Explode a moment
- Shrink a century
- Insert more meaningful dialogue
- Add three new details
- Revise the order of events: begin in medias res
- Count how many senses you included in your
sensory description, then add more or vary them
- Include musical devices such as alliteration,
repetition or onomatopoeia
- Add some more figurative language
- Compare things using a simile, a metaphor,
synecdoche or metonymy
- Personify something
Editing
Suggestions
- Replace Òto beÓ verbs with more active ones
- Revise passive voice into active voice
- Add more specific or evocative nouns or verbs
- Combine sentences (see below)
- Cut out inessentials
- Eliminate excessive modifiers (adjectives and
adverbs)
- Take out Òthen,Ó ÒitÓ and ÒthereÓ
- Ex: There were three men sitting under the tree
- Ex: It was _______ .
- Ex. Then we _______ .

