90 Descriptive Essay Topics

Naturally, you can’t begin descriptive essay writing without a topic. Thus, having a suitable topic is a primary step to initiating your writing journey, as the body centers around recalling an event. Nonetheless, the trick often lies in finding the correct vocabulary to describe the events without plagiarism or exaggerations.

How To Select The Best Descriptive Essay Topic: Follow the Criteria in Topic Finding

The basic criteria for choosing a topic should answer the question; why are you writing this essay? Here are steps and tips to guide your topic selection:

• Identify the reason for writing the essay. It must be a resolution, an occurrence, or an experience that you can still recall with acuity.
• Classify people, occurrences, and experiences in different categories.
• Connect your ideas using a rough draft. The connections must be logical to avoid idea conflicts when writing the paper.
• Write down concise and straight-to-point topics under different categories then sample out the ones you feel comfortable handling.

Once through with the criteria, pick one topic that you feel comfortable handling. Make you’re writing distinct and interesting to captivate the reader.

List of Descriptive Essay Topics: Sample Areas to Explore

When the difficulty of identifying a topic has been lifted, a student can comfortably craft their descriptive essay. Here are topics one can choose from.

Topics for Activities and Things

• My first overseas trip
• My favorite TV show
• My first Facebook experience
• My favorite music genre
• My favorite family vacation
• My first childhood memory
• The concert of a lifetime
• The tears of joy that still run deep

Geographical Location Topics

• Favorite mountain hiking experience
• Most memorable tour location
• My ideal camping vacation
• Best town visit in my childhood
• My best field excursion experience
• My latest museum visit experience
• Best outdoor walk experience
• Favorite fishing trip

Family and People Related Topics

• My high school mentor
• Most innovative member of the family
• My Die hard friend
• The imaginative friend I never met
• The oldest man in my neighborhood
• The high school friend I miss most
• The person who makes me laugh loudest
• My favorite science teacher
• My favorite young family photo
• The weirdest person in the village

Topics for Recollections

• My oldest childhood Halloween memory
• Best summer vacation ever
• The most memorable concert I have attended
• Most memorable childhood trip with the family
• Special moments with my family during Christmas
• My happiest memory as a child
• First time to meet with my childhood friend
• Most unexpected football outcome
• Most embarrassing childhood moments
• Most embarrassing first days in high school
• My first encounter with a celebrity

Extraordinary Events Related Topics

• A visit to the antechamber
• The horrifying experience in the graveyard at night
• My worst experience in a gas station toilet
• An encounter with an alien
• My secret tattoo
• A walk on the moon
• The unusual scary, and comic ride in the subway
• Lost in the dark streets
• Alone amid unfamiliar strangers
• The first year in the college experience
• An encounter with an online criminal
• The unexpected visitor from space
• Attacked by strangers in the wee hours of the night

Descriptive Essay Topics for College Students

• Describe your experience at your first amusement park.
• Write a story about your favorite experience with nature.
• Describe your childhood idol.
• Discuss your family dynamic. Who do you take after and why?
• Discuss the scariest experience you’ve ever had.
• How was your experience on your first day of college different from your expectations?
• What has been your most memorable experience with food?
• Talk about your favorite pastime.
• If you could get a tattoo, what would it be and why?
• Think back to your childhood and describe your favorite toy.

After identifying a topic, a student is free to begin their writing. However, it is advisable to choose a focus area that you can easily tackle to help in your idea formulation and enhance your flow.

Descriptive Essay Topics for High School Students

• The history of the development of financial relations between people and countries.
• How have war formats changed with each century?
• How is drug rehab going in the UK?
• How seed values are changing in the 21st century.
• Fighting discrimination around the world.
• How the media space has changed during the quarantine.
• Types of social diseases of modern society.
• Types of eating disorders. How common is eating disorder among teenagers?
• Development of virtual reality.
• The development of artificial intelligence.

Funny Descriptive Essay Topics

Read more: How to Write a Good Descriptive Essay

Descriptive Essay Questions: Examples for Class Assignments

• What are some of the things five strangers can discuss among themselves? How does each perceive the other person?
• What was your favorite toy during your childhood? Why did you prefer it over the others? How did it feel to hold it and play with it?
• Create a vivid description of a street. What kind of transport is in use? What audible noises can you hear? Which unusual odors do you smell?
• Describe your tattoo. What is the texture of the design? What is the color concept, and why was it applied to that part of the body?
• In your visit to the church, what kind of sounds did you hear? What was the experience you felt that day?
• Imagine a bakery visit, what kind of smells rent the atmosphere? What were the sounds you heard?
• During your latest visit to the museum, what did you see? How did the experience feel?
• What was your experience during your first rollercoaster ride?
• Imagining your first painting, what was the texture? What was the significance of all objects and color coding?
• In your first day as a fresher in college, what was the most embarrassing experience?

Descriptive Essay Ideas: Short, Simple, but Reflective Concepts

As a student, it is paramount to exercise one’s creativity both in the classroom setting and outside. Here are ideas for your essays:

• Think and write a descriptive essay on an expedition in the Sahara desert
• Taking a walk in the ancient Egyptian tombs alone
• Delivering an environmental preservation speech in front of a United Nations delegation
• The day I discovered that my true friend was a government spy
• A day alone in the Louvre Museum

Participating in real-life events contributes to wholesome reasoning ability and enhances creativity. Through the exposure, the learner is equipped with different ideas for writing academic assignments.

The foundational rule in descriptive essay writing is drawing your readers to feel, hear, smell and taste what you are describing.  However, it tends to get challenging to describe something vividly and remain creative at the same time. Apart from the usual ideas about place and events or friends, you can broaden your thinking to describe rather extraordinary events and occurrences that other students hardly envision in their essays. We can help you with a descriptive essay, place your order now to get help from pro essay writers!