How to Make Your Writing More Vivid by Putting the Reader in the Picture: Showing, Not Telling

A student in my class, Samantha, was writing a difficult passage in her memoir, recounting the effect of her father's death on her family. In a chapter deal­ing with the day after her father died, Sam described sitting in the kitchen with her aunt, watching breakfast cleanup, trying to   absorb the grief that had descended on everything.  

But the writ­i…