Learner Resource 19

Descriptive vocabulary

Highlight the adjectives, adverbs and verbs in the following texts:

Text 1:

“As it says that, a shape presses through, out of the panel of light. A face. I’m too terrified to scream. It’s a monster from my very worst nightmare. Pale red skin. A pair of dark red eyes. No nose. A small mouth. Sharp, grey teeth. As it leans further into my bedroom, I see more of it and the horror intensifies. It doesn’t have a heart! There’s a hole in the left side of its chest, but where the heart should be are dozens of tiny, hissing snakes.

The monster frowns and stretches a hand towards me. I can see more than two arms – at least four or five. I want to pull away. Dive beneath my bed. Scream for help. But the voice that spoke to me a few seconds ago won’t let me. It whispers quickly, words I can’t follow. And I find myself standing firm, taking a step towards the panel of light and its emerging monster. I raise my right hand and curl the fingers into a fist. I can feel a strange tingling sensation, like pins and needles.

The monster stops. Its eyes narrow. It looks round my bedroom uncertainly. Then slowly, smoothly, it withdraws, pulling back into the panel of light, vanishing gradually until only its red eyes remain, staring out at me from the surrounding blueness, twin circles of an unspoken evil. Then they’re gone too and I’m alone again, just me and the light.”

Shan, D. (2013). The Demon Thief. First edition. London: HarperCollins. p.13.

Text 2:

That face of hers was the most frightful and frightening thing I have ever seen. Just looking at it gave me the shakes all over. It was so crumpled and wizened, so shrunken and shrivelled, it looked as though it had been pickled in vinegar. It was a fearsome and ghastly sight. There was something terribly wrong with it, something foul and putrid and decayed. It seemed quite literally to be rotting away at the edges, and in the middle of the face, around the mouth and cheeks, I could see the skin all cankered and worm-eaten, as though maggots were working away there.

There are times when something is so frightful you become mesmerised by it and can’t look away. I was like that now. I was transfixed. I was numbed. I was magnetised by the sheer horror of this woman’s features. But there was more to it than that. There was a look of serpents in those eyes of hers as they flashed around the audience.

Dahl, R. (2010). The Witches. London: Random House. p.81.

Version 11© OCR 2017

Developing extended writing skills

Text 3:

His face was a strong, a very strong, aquiline, with high bridge of the thin nose and peculiarly arched nostrils, with lofty domed forehead, and hair growing scantily round the temples but profusely elsewhere. His eyebrows were very massive, almost meeting over the nose, and with bushy hair that seemed to curl in its own profusion. The mouth, so far as I could see it under the heavy moustache, was fixed and rather cruel-looking, with peculiarly sharp white teeth.

These protruded over the lips, whose remarkable ruddiness showed astonishing vitality in a man of his years. For the rest, his ears were pale, and at the tops extremely pointed. The chin was broad and strong, and the cheeks firm though thin. The general effect was one of extraordinary pallor.

Hitherto I had noticed the backs of his hands as they lay on his knees in the firelight, and they had seemed rather white and fine. But seeing them now close to me, I could not but notice that they were rather coarse, broad, with squat fingers. Strange to say, there were hairs in the centre of the palm. The nails were long and fine, and cut to a sharp point. As the Count leaned over me and his hands touched me, I could not repress a shudder. It may have been that his breath was rank, but a horrible feeling of nausea came over me, which, do what I would, I could not conceal.

The Count, evidently noticing it, drew back. And with a grim sort of smile, which showed more than he had yet done his protuberant teeth, sat himself down again on his own side of the fireplace. We were both silent for a while, and as I looked towards the window I saw the first dim streak of the coming dawn. There seemed a strange stillness over everything. But as I listened, I heard as if from down below in the valley the howling of many wolves.

Stocker, B (2004). Dracula. London: Penguin Classics. p.18.

Version 11© OCR 2017

Developing extended writing skills