Sensory language is writing that appeals to the reader's senses, so they experience a scene instead of being told about it: the hiss of a kettle, the smell of a wet dog, the sting of salt in a cut. It covers the five senses, sight, sound, smell, taste and touch, plus two that writers often forget: movement, and the body's inner sensations, such as hunger, nausea or a pounding heart. The pictures it puts in the reader's mind are called imagery.
Below: the seven kinds of imagery, why filter words get in the way, classic examples of each kind, how to choose the few details a scene needs, and an exercise to try on your own pages.
Seven kinds of sensory imagery
| Imagery | Sense | What it covers | Example |
|---|---|---|---|
| ImageryVisual | SenseSight | What it coversLight, color, shape, things in motion | ExampleThe porch light came on, yellow with moths. |
| ImageryAuditory | SenseSound | What it coversNoise, music, voices, silence | ExampleThe radiator knocked twice and went quiet. |
| ImageryOlfactory | SenseSmell | What it coversScents and odors | ExampleThe hallway smelled of bleach and someone else's dinner. |
| ImageryGustatory | SenseTaste | What it coversFlavor, and the feel of food in the mouth | ExampleThe coffee tasted of the paper cup. |
| ImageryTactile | SenseTouch | What it coversTexture, temperature, pressure, pain | ExampleThe bench was still warm from the last person. |
| ImageryKinesthetic | SenseMovement | What it coversMotion, balance, the position of the body | ExampleThe ferry dropped away under her feet. |
| ImageryOrganic | SenseThe inner body | What it coversHunger, thirst, fatigue, heartbeat, nausea | ExampleHer stomach turned over when the phone rang. |
The last two rows have names in physiology as well. Proprioception, a term the physiologist Charles Sherrington introduced in 1906, is the sense of your own movement, force and body position. Balance comes from the vestibular system of the inner ear working with vision and proprioception. Interoception is the set of senses that report the internal state of the body: the heartbeat, breathing, hunger and fullness, the gut and the bladder. You don't need the terms, but they are a reminder that a character on the page has a body, and that the body is always reporting.
Filtering: when to cut saw, heard and felt
Filter words are verbs such as saw, heard, felt, smelled, noticed and realized. They put the viewpoint character between the reader and the sensation. Most can go, because in close point of view everything on the page is already what the character perceives.
Filtered. She heard the rain start on the roof. She felt the cold coming through the window, and she could smell woodsmoke from next door. She saw that the fire had gone out. Then she heard the gate.
Direct. Rain started on the roof. Cold came through the window, and with it woodsmoke from next door. The fire had gone out. Then she heard the gate.
The direct version is shorter and closer: rain, cold, smoke and a dead fire reach the reader without passing through her. The last “heard” stays, because there the hearing is the event. Someone is at the gate, and the moment she notices is the moment the scene turns. Keep a filter word like that when the act of perceiving is the point, when the perception is uncertain (“he thought he heard a car”), or when an omniscient narrator needs to say whose senses we are in.
Sensory language examples from literature
One public-domain example for each sense, with a note on what makes it work. Notice how often the work is done by a verb or a noun, not an adjective.
The red sun was pasted in the sky like a wafer.
Henry has just watched his friend Jim Conklin die. Crane ends the chapter on no named feeling, only a color, a shape and the flat verb pasted, as if the sky were cheap scenery that didn't care. The reader supplies the grief.
To dwellers in a wood almost every species of tree has its voice as well as its feature. At the passing of the breeze the fir-trees sob and moan no less distinctly than they rock; the holly whistles as it battles with itself; the ash hisses amid its quiverings; the beech rustles while its flat boughs rise and fall.
Each tree gets its own sound verb: sob, moan, whistle, hiss, rustle. In the next paragraph a man walks through the dark plantation on a cold, starry Christmas Eve, and Hardy introduces him only by the sound of his footsteps and his singing. The reader meets the wood, and the man, by ear.
And suddenly the memory returns. The taste was that of the little crumb of madeleine which on Sunday mornings at Combray (because on those mornings I did not go out before church-time), when I went to say good day to her in her bedroom, my aunt Léonie used to give me, dipping it first in her own cup of real or of lime-flower tea.
A few lines later Proust explains why: long after people are dead and things are scattered, “the smell and taste of things remain poised a long time, like souls.” For Proust's narrator they outlast every other trace of the past, which makes them a quick way into a character's memory.
Mr Leopold Bloom ate with relish the inner organs of beasts and fowls. He liked thick giblet soup, nutty gizzards, a stuffed roast heart, liverslices fried with crustcrumbs, fried hencods' roes. Most of all he liked grilled mutton kidneys which gave to his palate a fine tang of faintly scented urine.
The list is specific enough to taste, and the last detail is one most writers would leave out. It introduces a whole character: a man who is curious, physical and unembarrassed by the body.
Some one was drawing water and my teacher placed my hand under the spout. As the cool stream gushed over one hand she spelled into the other the word water, first slowly, then rapidly. I stood still, my whole attention fixed upon the motions of her fingers.
The moment Keller, deaf and blind from early childhood, connected a word with a thing is told entirely through touch: the cool stream on one hand, the letters on the other. The sentence before it adds smell, the honeysuckle covering the well-house.
A seat in this boat was not unlike a seat upon a bucking broncho, and, by the same token, a broncho is not much smaller. The craft pranced and reared, and plunged like an animal. As each wave came, and she rose for it, she seemed like a horse making at a fence outrageously high. … Then, after scornfully bumping a crest, she would slide, and race, and splash down a long incline, and arrive bobbing and nodding in front of the next menace.
Crane survived the sinking of the steamship Commodore off Florida in January 1897 in a dinghy, and the story puts the reader in the boat through its motion. The verbs carry it: the boat prances, rears, plunges and rises, then slides, races and splashes down, and arrives “bobbing and nodding” at the next wave. That is kinesthetic imagery: the reader follows the movement wave by wave, from the seat, rather than watching the boat from the shore.
The blood of his body recoiled before it. The blood was alive, like the dog, and like the dog it wanted to hide away and cover itself up from the fearful cold. So long as he walked four miles an hour, he pumped that blood, willy-nilly, to the surface; but now it ebbed away and sank down into the recesses of his body. The extremities were the first to feel its absence.
The man has stopped walking on a Yukon trail at seventy-five below zero. Here London doesn't describe frost on the skin. He describes the cold from inside the body, as blood retreating from the hands and feet, and that is organic imagery: a sensation that starts within, where no one else could see it.
How to choose sensory details
No fixed number works for every scene, and no scene needs all seven kinds. What matters is which details you pick, where they go and who notices them.
| Where in the scene | How much | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Where in the sceneThe opening | How muchTwo or three details, at least one not visual | WhyGrounds the reader in a place before anything happens |
| Where in the sceneFast action | How muchA few, mostly sound, touch and movement | WhyLong description stalls the action |
| Where in the sceneThe turning point | How muchThe most, beat by beat | WhyDetail slows time, which tells the reader this moment matters |
| Where in the sceneTransitions | How muchOne detail, or none | WhyThe reader only needs to know where and when |
- Pick two or three senses, not seven. Many scenes are carried by the two or three senses that suit the moment: a chase by movement and sound, a family meal by smell and taste. Use the seven kinds as a checklist for finding what a scene is missing, not as a quota.
- Choose what the viewpoint character would notice. A cook walks into a kitchen and smells that the oil is too hot. A child notices the cat. The detail says as much about the person as the place, which is why description and point of view are hard to separate.
- Prefer one exact detail to three general ones. “The smell of burnt coffee” does more than “a strong, unpleasant, bitter smell.” Name the source of a smell or a sound and the reader supplies the rest.
- Slow down where it counts. The guide to pacing calls it stretch: at the moment everything turns, sensory detail beat by beat makes three seconds last a page.
- Put the strongest detail last. The end of a sentence is where the stress usually falls, so that is where the sting of salt should go.
For setting in particular, where much sensory description lives, the guide to how to write setting covers research and setting as character.
Common mistakes with sensory detail
Works
- A sound, smell or texture in most scenes, not only sight
- The source named: diesel, lilac, a wet dog
- Detail the character would notice, in their words
- The most detail at the moment that matters most
- A body that gets tired, hungry and out of breath
Doesn't
- Scenes that are all sight, like a silent film
- General words: a nice smell, a loud noise
- A paragraph inventory of all five senses before anything happens
- Stacked adjectives that repeat each other
- A character who runs a mile and isn't breathing hard
Stacked adjectives are the quickest route to purple prose, and a stock simile (“smelled like heaven”) tells the reader nothing about the smell. If you need more words, the descriptive words list has 300 grouped by sense and subject, each with an example phrase.
Exercise: choose the senses a scene needs
Here is a first-draft paragraph that uses only sight, and a revision that doesn't add every sense. It picks the two that suit a nervous man arriving at a hospital at night, movement and the inner body, plus one smell to mark the place.
Before. Dev got off the night bus outside the hospital. It was raining. The entrance was bright, and there were people waiting inside. He was nervous.
After. The bus lurched to a stop and Dev caught the pole too late, and his shoulder hit the window. The automatic doors opened on air that smelled of floor polish. He hadn't eaten since noon, and his heart was going faster than his feet.
- Movement: the lurch and the late grab at the pole show a man whose mind is somewhere else.
- The inner body: hunger and a racing heart replace “he was nervous,” which is show, don't tell through the body.
- Smell: one detail, floor polish, says “hospital” without the word.
- Left out: the rain, the bright entrance, the people waiting, any sound or taste. All of them could be true, but none tells the reader anything about Dev tonight.
Now try it on your own pages:
- List the senses a scene of yours uses. If one that would matter to the viewpoint character is missing, add a detail for it; if a detail tells the reader nothing, cut it.
- Rewrite one paragraph with no visual detail at all.
- Show a character's fear using only the inner body: heart, breath, stomach, hands. Don't name the feeling.
- Set a short scene on something that moves, such as a ferry, a horse or an elevator, and make the reader feel the motion without the word moved.
Sensory gaps are hard to see in your own draft, because you already know what the room smells like. For the first exercise, select a scene and ask the Strokes Assistant which senses it uses and which it leaves out.
Frequently asked questions
Do you need to use all five senses in every scene?
No. Many strong scenes rely on two or three senses chosen for the moment: sound and movement in a chase, smell and taste at a family meal. A paragraph that touches all five, or all seven, tends to read as an inventory and slows the scene. Use the full list to find what a scene is missing, then choose the details the viewpoint character would notice.
Is sensory language the same as imagery?
They are two names for nearly the same thing. Sensory language is the words that appeal to the senses, and imagery is what they create in the reader's mind. Imagery is the usual term in literary analysis, where it is often divided into visual, auditory, olfactory, gustatory, tactile, kinesthetic and organic imagery.
Is sensory language figurative language?
Not necessarily. “The coffee tasted of the paper cup” is literal and sensory. Figurative language such as simile and metaphor can carry sensory detail, as in Crane's sun “pasted in the sky like a wafer,” but plenty of strong sensory writing is literal. The two overlap without being the same.
