Descriptive Writing – Focus in detail

Descriptive Writing – Focus in detail
The point of descriptive writing is to give enough carefully selected and presented information for the reader to create a strong visual image of the scene in their mind.
Supposing, for example, your students are handed a picture of a London scene, set in Victorian Britain in winter time, full of stalls and churches and snow and people and shops and carriages and stray dogs and lamps and so on. The written task might say: “write a description based on the picture.” It is natural that as the eye roams around the contents of the picture the description that follows will be in a logical linear sequence. So the student may describe a stall, then the church, then the snow then the people, followed by the shops, the carriages, stray dogs and lamps and so on.
The problem I have noticed with such an approach is that although connectives are used in the form of ‘next to that is…” or ‘behind the church there is a dog that roams’ etc, the basic structure can resemble, in essence, a list.