Description

Read from Gary Paulsen -- Winter Room 

similes:

To illustrate, in Nature Emerson writes,

I see the spectacle of morning from the hill-top over against my house, from day-break to sunrise, with emotions which an angel might share. The long slender bars of cloud float like fishes in the sea of crimson light. (234)

Annie Dillard uses the following simile in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek:

In flat country I watch every sunset in hopes of seeing the green ray. The green ray is a seldom-seen streak of light that rises from the sun like a spurting fountain at the moment of sunset; it throbs into the sky for two seconds and disappears. One more reason to keep my eyes open (17).

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Onomatopoeia

An onomatopoeia is a word whose sound imitates the thing it is trying to describe. For instance, the sounds of a “crackling fire” or a “murmuring river” are echoed in the words themselves. Here is Thoreau’s description of the pond in Walden:

The bullfrogs trump to the usher in the night, and the note of the whippoorwill is borne on the rippling wind from over the water. Sympathy with the fluttering alder and poplar leaves almost takes away my breath; yet, like the lake, my serenity is rippled but not ruffled (153).

Words like trump, usher, rippling, fluttering, and ruffled all create a tone for this description that goes beyond seeing. We can actually hear the lake in this description.

Abbey’s Desert Solitaire is another text that heavily uses onomatopoeia. Here is a short list of words drawn from the pages of Desert Solitaire:

crackle, rustle, scuffle, brittle, whispers, slithers, hisses, mutter, thunder, crawled, sliding, roar, whistling, ticking, cough, babble, mumble, rattle, sizzle, bawling, yawning, gasp, splash, scratching, clattered, buzzing, humble.

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This illustrates both assonance and alliteration: 

Here is an example of assonance, also from Dillard:

A male English sparrow, his mouth stuffed, was hopping in and out of an old nest in a bare tree, and sloshing around in its bottom. A robin on red alert in the grass, trailing half a worm from its bill, bobbed three steps and straightened up, performing unawares the universal robin trick. (113)

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