Chapter 4: Descriptive Text

 

Descriptive text atau dalam istilah penulisan dikenal dengan “description” merupakan salah satu pelajaran bahasa Inggris yang harus dikuasai tidak hanya oleh siswa sekolah menengah pertama tetapi juga siswa sekolah menengah atas, mahasiswa dan siapa saja yang menyukai bahasa Inggris. Karena bagaimanapun, materi deskriptif sangat diperlukan untuk peningkatan kemampuan berbahasa Inggris kita.

Beberapa penulis terkenal terutama penulis fiksi memiliki kemampuan yang baik dalam menulis teks deskriptif sehingga tulisannya sangat mudah dibaca dan dipahami. Oleh karena itu, jika kita mampu menguasai pelajaran ini dengan baik, kita mungkin bisa menjadi penulis yang hebat di masa depan.

Selanjutnya, penjelasan dan contoh teks deskriptif ini dapat membantu teman yang masih dalam perjalanan panjang untuk belajar bahasa Inggris. Jangan sungkan untuk membaca penjelasan teks deskriptif di bawah ini, semakin sering kita membaca tentang teks ini kita akan semakin bisa memahaminya. Dan alangkah baiknya jika kita tidak hanya memahami semata, tetapi juga bisa menulis teks deskriptif sendiri.

A. Definition

Secara umum, descriptive text adalah teks yang mengatakan seperti apa seseorang atau sesuatu. Tujuannya adalah untuk mendeskripsikan dan mengungkapkan orang, tempat, atau benda tertentu.

Jadi, teks deskriptif merupakan teks yang menggambarkan pengalaman yang berhubungan dengan indera, seperti apa itu bentuk, bunyi, rasa. Kebanyakan teks deskriptif adalah tentang pengalaman visual, namun pada kenyataannya pengalaman selain indera penglihatan, kita juga bisa menggunakannya untuk membuat teks deskriptif.

Jadi, jelas disinggung bahwa teks deskriptif ini adalah teks yang menjelaskan bagaimana rupa seseorang atau benda, baik bentuknya, sifatnya, jumlahnya dan lain-lain. Tujuan teks deskriptif yaitu untuk mendeskripsikan, merepresentasikan atau mengungkapkan seseorang atau suatu benda, baik abstrak maupun konkrit.

 

B. Generic Structure

Saat menulis teks deskriptif, ada beberapa struktur umum (sebenarnya tidak terlalu begitu wajib) agar tulisan kita menjadi tersusun rapi. Strukturnya adalah:

# Identifikasi: Paragraf ini berisi tentang perkenalan seseorang, tempat, binatang atau benda yang akan dideskripsikan.
# Description: Paragraf ini berisi uraian tentang sesuatu seperti binatang, benda, tempat atau orang dengan cara mendeskripsikan ciri, bentuk, warna, atau apapun yang berhubungan dengan apa yang penulis gambarkan.

 

C. Language Features

Apa sih language feature itu? Ini adalah ciri khas sebuah teks. Dengan memahami language feature kita akan jadi lebih tahu fitur-fitur apa yang digunakan dalam sebuah teks baik itu tensesnya apa, pola kalimatnya, part of speech-nya, dan sebagainya. Nah, dalam descriptive text, fitur-fiturnya antara lain:

- Objek spesial: memiliki objek tertentu, tidak umum dan unik (hanya satu). contoh: Bandengan Beach, My Home, Tokyo, My Mother.
- Penggunaan kata sifat (adjektiva) untuk memperjelas kata benda, misalnya: beautiful beach, good-looking man, a popular places in Tokyo, dan lain-lain.
- Penggunaan simple present tense: Pola kalimat yang digunakan adalah simple present karena menyatakan fakta dari objek yang dideskripsikan.
- Kata kerja (verba): kata kerja yang menunjukkan suatu aktivitas (misalnya, run, sleep, walk, cut, dan lain-lain). 

Tips menulis teks deskriptif:
1. Pastikan untuk memilih orang, tempat, atau benda yang bermakna. Yang memiliki keunikan dan ciri khas yang membuat orang penasaran untuk membaca.
2. Perkenalkan orang, tempat, atau hal yang Anda gambarkan
3. Libatkan indra penglihatan pembaca Anda. Bangun sebaik mungkin kata demi kata, kalimat demi kalimat, paragraf demi paragraf agar pembaca dapat merasakan langsung.
4. Jelaskan bau dan rasa jika kamu bisa.
5. Jelaskan bagaimana perasaan momen tersebut.
6. Jelaskan bagaimana suara subjeknya.
7. Lakukan observasi unik.
8. Sertakan beberapa bahasa kiasan.

 

D. Contoh Descriptive Text  

 Level: Easy

The Blue Whale

 

The blue whale is the largest living animal to have ever lived on the planet Earth. Blue Whales are way larger than the largest dinosaur that ever lived. The largest Blue Whales can grow as large as 100 feet long, which is longer than three school buses put together!

Even though blue whales are huge, they eat tiny creatures known as krill. Krill are tiny shrimp-like animals. The whale simply opens its mouth, fills it with krill and salt water, and filters the water out of plates in its mouth called baleen. The blue whale may eat over 8,000 pounds of krill in a single day!

Level: Normal

Vincent Van Gogh

Van Gogh was a Dutch painter that was classified as a post-impressionist painter. He was born on March 30, 1853 in Zundert, Netherlands and died on 29 July in Auvers-sur-Oise, France.

At his life time, he was stated as a stupid person who tried and failed to learn painting. Not only that, he was totally poor and suffered.

At first, he failed in love and thus made him suffered in life. He failed to be anything like normal people. His failure in love broke his mental and confidence.

Before he became a painter, or let say liked painting, he was a protestant missionary in Southern Belgium.

His duty was in the coal mine and there he saw the truth about suffering and the truth about his own God. Seeing human suffer he also wanted to experience the same in the name of humanity. He lost his faith and started to paint.

Traveling from one place to another, Van Gogh lived in poverty. His life was spent to paint even people said that his art work was a bad art.

He also suffered from psychotic and delusion. At the last time of his life, he was at the mental hospital, Auvers-sur-Oise, France. He was depressed and finally shot himself and died two days after that.

After his death and the popularity of the discourse on madness, especially the knowledge of the psychotic, his painting became popular and categorized as a high art of post-impressionist painting.

Unfortunately, Van Gogh never knew that the prices of his painting are now billions.

 (Source: https://www.gudangpelajaran.com/23-contoh-descriptive-text-lengkap-beserta-strukturnya-pengertian-ciri-ciri-dan-tujuan/)

Level: Hard

Global Warming

 

Over the past 50 years, the average global temperature has increased at the fastest rate in recorded history. And experts see the trend is accelerating: All but one of the 16 hottest years in NASA’s 134-year record have occurred since 2000.

Climate change deniers have argued that there has been a “pause” or a “slowdown” in rising global temperatures, but several recent studies, including a 2015 paper published in the journal Science, have disproved this claim. And scientists say that unless we curb global-warming emissions, average U.S. temperatures could increase by up to 10 degrees Fahrenheit over the next century.

Global warming occurs when carbon dioxide (CO2) and other air pollutants and greenhouse gases collect in the atmosphere and absorb sunlight and solar radiation that have bounced off the earth’s surface. Normally, this radiation would escape into space—but these pollutants, which can last for years to centuries in the atmosphere, trap the heat and cause the planet to get hotter. That's what's known as the greenhouse effect.

In the United States, the burning of fossil fuels to make electricity is the largest source of heat-trapping pollution, producing about two billion tons of CO2 every year. Coal-burning power plants are by far the biggest polluters. The country’s second-largest source of carbon pollution is the transportation sector, which generates about 1.7 billion tons of CO2 emissions a year.

Curbing dangerous climate change requires very deep cuts in emissions, as well as the use of alternatives to fossil fuels worldwide. The good news is that we’ve started a turnaround: CO2 emissions in the United States actually decreased from 2005 to 2014, thanks in part to new, energy-efficient technology and the use of cleaner fuels. And scientists continue to develop new ways to modernize power plants, generate cleaner electricity, and burn less gasoline while we drive. The challenge is to be sure these solutions are put to use and widely adopted.

Scientists agree that the earth’s rising temperatures are fueling longer and hotter heat waves, more frequent droughts, heavier rainfall, and more powerful hurricanes. In 2015, for example, scientists said that an ongoing drought in California—the state’s worst water shortage in 1,200 years—had been intensified by 15 percent to 20 percent by global warming. They also said the odds of similar droughts happening in the future had roughly doubled over the past century. And in 2016, the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine announced that it’s now possible to confidently attribute certain weather events, like some heat waves, directly to climate change.

 

Baca juga: Argumentative Text