Contrasting descriptions

Description 1:

            As I sit on my fluffy comfortable bed, I decided to take a look around my cozy room. The layout of our room gives us plenty of floor room to move around freely as if we weren’t even sharing the room. The lights are shining brightening the room.  A soft carpet covers the hard tile floor.  My roommate’s bed is full of vivid colors and patterns.  Blue, green, yellow, pink, and white all cover the quilt in designs and flowers.  Then there’s the abundance of fluffy, comforting pillows on her bed that make it inviting to jump into when trying to get comfortable.  We both have warm, soft, fleece blankets on our bed to wrap up in when we want to relax and watch a movie.  Also, to make us feel more at home we have lots of pictures all around the room.  Pictures of high school friends and memories, new college memories, and family members that put a smile on our face each time we look at them.

Description 2:

            As I sit on my bed, I begin to look around.  The door to our room is shut making me feel cut off from the rest of my suite.  Our window is never open, never letting any natural lighting in. And the carpet is dark brown making our room seem even smaller than it is.  Even worse, the carpet looks like a black dalmation with white spots. What open floor space we have has shoes and clothing laying around on it.  Then I began to look at our desks.  The chairs are hard wood; both of them are cluttered with books, a printer, and any other miscellaneous items not leaving us much room to do work.  Our trashcans are overflowing with food we bring back to eat.  And our dresser is cluttered with lotions, brushes, make-up, and hair straighteners.  In simple words it looks like we should do come major cleaning.     

Self-reflection:

             After writing the two descriptions, I found that it was easier for me to describe things in a favorable way rather than unpleasant.  I found that I also write more long complex sentences, so when I went back and reread my paragraphs I ended up trying to change some of my sentences to vary structure.  This exercise made me really focus on word choice, which is harder than I expected.  I feel like some of the words used were ridiculous, but needed to get the image across to the reader.  Also, this exercise really showed how what details you choose to tell or how you tell them shows how angle of vision can be manipulative.  It’s manipulative because it makes the reader see what you want them to see, whether it is good or bad.  It just showed in the exercise because we were describing the same scene each time, but the details we chose to mention or how we described them set the tone for how the reader would interpret the scene.