What is imagery?

Imagery can help writers create worlds that readers feel part of.

Key learning points

• How writers use imagery
• The impact of showing, not telling
• How to appeal to a reader’s senses
• Creating layers of meaning
• How to use imagery as shorthand

Imagery is descriptive writing which appeals to one or more of the five senses.

This extract from EB White’s Charlotte’s Web uses imagery to describe what is left behind after a fair leaves town:

In the hard-packed dirt of the midway, after the glaring lights are out and the people have gone to bed, you will find a veritable treasure of popcorn fragments, frozen custard dribblings, candied apples abandoned by tired children, sugar fluff crystals, salted almonds, popsicles, partially gnawed ice cream cones and wooden sticks of lollipops.

EB White uses lots of imagery that relates to our sense of taste, so the reader is reminded of the foods and flavours associated with the fair, helping the reader to feel connected to the scene.

Imagery can also include figurative language including:

• similes
• metaphors
• personification
• anthropomorphism
• allusion

These type of imagery often use comparisons to create a more vivid impression for a reader.

Descriptive writing is more interesting if you show your reader what you mean rather than just telling them. For example:

She felt tired.

This example isn’t very interesting, as it tells us how the character feels. Here is it again, but this time showing the character’s feelings rather than telling:

She yawned and struggled to keep her eyes open.

Read this example from Imbolo Mbue’s Behold the Dreamers:

His throat went dry. His palms moistened. Unable to reach for his handkerchief in the packed downtown subway, he wiped both palms on his pants.

The dry throat and moist palms show us that the character is feeling nervous, even though Mbue doesn’t directly tell us we can still know this from the image created.

There are five main senses: sight, sound, taste, smell and touch. When we write, it is a good idea to appeal to more than one different sense, so that a reader can better visualise what we’re describing.

Click on the image below to explore the five senses

Words can have different layers of meaning.

• There is the surface meaning, called the denotation.
• There are also other things which we might associate with the words, called the connotations.

For example, the word ‘red’ denotes the colour red. Red also has many connotations such as danger, anger, love and heat.

Examples of denotations and connotations:

• Rose

  • Denotation = flower
  • Connotation = love, romance

• Dove

  • Denotation = a small white bird
  • Connotation = peace, hope

Writers can use the connotations of words to deepen their use of imagery.

For example, in Shakespeare’s Macbeth, Donalbain says:

There’s daggers in men’s smiles.

The word ‘dagger’ has connotations of violence. Shakespeare is using this connotation to suggest that the character may be in danger and that the ‘smiles’ are hiding something more unpleasant.

Writers can use imagery to symbolise deeper meanings:

She’d trampled the same dirt roads her entire life; she’d carved her initials on the bottom of school desks that her mother had once used, and that her children would someday, feeling her jagged scratching with their fingers.

In this example from The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett, the writer uses the image of initials carved underneath a desk as a shorthand for feeling trapped, because three generations of the same family have used the same school desks and nothing has changed.