Select a person, place, or thing to observe. Ideally, your subject should be something that contains enough details that you can use the full range of your senses (sight, sound, smell, taste, touch). You might also consider selecting something that you are unfamiliar with so that you will see it with fresh eyes. (Choosing a fresh subject can bring something new to your audience, making your paper more interesting; you can accomplish this goal, as well, by observing a common subject more carefully than a typical, casual observer, again bringing something new to your readers).
Finally, you should avoid clichéd subjects because you may be too heavily
influenced by descriptions that you have heard or read before, rather than experiencing the subject for yourself.
Your Goal: Your goal is to recreate the experience of observing your subject for your reader.
First, collect as many sense details as you can. Keep going back to the subject, again and again, focusing more and more closely until you begin to notice details that you missed originally, ones that your readers would also likely not notice if they were observing your subject.
2)
Once you have collected sufficient sense details, you should look for a dominant impression that you wish to covey to your reader. Here, think about audience, purpose, and context to help you focus on a dominant impression. Look for patterns, repetitions, variations, contrasts, and other relationships in the details. At this point, you are trying to reflect on the observations that you have made, thinking creatively to come up with new insights, rather than looking for the obvious. This tactic will make your writing more interesting to your readers because they will see a live person behind the observations, one who interprets and makes sense of his or her environment.
3)
Use the dominant impression as you would a thesis statement to help you decide what belongs in the paper and what does not, what you need to focus on and emphasize and what needs to be de-emphasized or even cut out. If you have gathered your details effectively, you will have plenty of decisions to make.
4)
At this point, you should begin considering your paper’s organization. Spatial and chronological ordering
are usually important to observational papers, but any of the organizational methods (comparison, contrast, definition, classification, etc.) are available for you to use. Again, consider your audience, purpose, and context to help you make decisions.
5)
Next, use coherence techniques to help make clear to the reader the relationships between ideas.
Evaluate your use of transitional phrases, repeated keywords, synonyms, parallelism, and consistent pronouns, and think about how these techniques can help make your dominant impression clearer.
6)
Finally, once you have revised your paper for content concerns (unity, development, organization, and coherence), consider sentence style, and then grammatical and mechanical correctness.