Can you describe that for me?

Every good story needs a setting.  The setting is where events take place.

Read this piece of description which comes near the opening of Great Expectations, the subject of my current series of posts:

“Ours was the marsh country, down by the river, within, as the river wound, twenty miles of the sea. My first most vivid and broad impression of the identity of things seems to me to have been gained on a memorable raw afternoon towards evening. At such a time I found out for certain that this bleak place overgrown with nettles was the churchyard … and that the dark flat wilderness beyond the churchyard, intersected with dikes and mounds and gates, with scattered cattle feeding on it, was the marshes; and that the low leaden line beyond was the river; and that the distant savage lair from which the wind was rushing was the sea; and that the small bundle of shivers growing afraid of it all and beginning to cry, was Pip.”

Can you work out how Dickens makes his description so effective?

My ebooks help students to improve their writing. But I'm No Good At Creative Writing, The Five Sentence Types Workbook, and A Dash of Punctuation students through how to plot a story, how to vary their sentence structures effectively and how to use colons and semicolons.

They are part of my expanding series, the Hartland English Guides.

Together with my work in schools, university preparation and online tuition, they are part of my mission - Nurturing Excellence.