One very important thing in all forms of writing – not just poetry – is description. When writing, an author should describe the setting and characters thoroughly, in a way that resonates with the reader. All descriptions are written in hopes of putting a picture in your head, and especially as a sophomore, I think we're still learning how to write descriptions. Descriptions aren't as easy as everyone thinks: Not a good description, anyway. I read a lot of descriptive sentences from peer review essays and my trudge through numerous novels and short stories, and I rarely find that the descriptions really put a picture in my head. Not to discourage the way teachers teach descriptive writing, as I understand that if it's hard to even write a description, it should be very hard to teach it. Many descriptions go along the lines of “the sky was as blue as the crystal waters” of the Pacific and little white dots of cotton lined the pearlescent skies, fluttering lazily.” While there is generally nothing wrong with this description, I find it to be simply too wordy and all these descriptive words put together detract from the feel of the writing more than they add to it. I think the only time I've seen this form of description work was in a couple of mystery novels, and I suspect it would work well in the horror and macabre genre. However, if an author is trying to create a light or tense atmosphere, the excessive amount of words used to even describe the protagonist or antagonist's face takes away from whatever mood the author is trying to create. If a reader has to trawl through tons of descriptive words to finally get to what's really happening, the work is... middle of paper... clunky descriptions, yet it's listed as a picture poem, so it's assumed to be a very descriptive poem. The words are well chosen and the line breaks are useful (something novelists don't directly understand), but the poem itself is beautiful both visually and audibly. Speaking for myself, I find that extended descriptions are often boring and make me susceptible to skimming. I rarely actually come across a description that I find perfect, but I feel like JK Rowling often does a good job of providing details about her stories. Good descriptions are hard to write, so it would be too difficult to fill an entire novel with just good descriptions, so it's understandable that there will be a couple less aesthetic descriptions. However, the most annoying are the jobs without any good description and which simply follow crystal clear, blue and bright skies like the Pa