Imagery in poetry creates similar snapshots in a reader’s mind. Poets use imagery to draw readers into a sensory experience. Images will often provide us with mental snapshots that appeal to our senses of sight, sound, taste, touch, and smell.

Describing how something tastes, smells, sounds, or feels—not just how it looks—makes a passage or scene come alive. Using a combination of imagery and sensory imagery arms the reader with as much information as possible and helps them create a more vivid mental picture of what is happening.

Good readers construct mental images as they read a text. By using prior knowledge and background experiences, readers connect the author’s writing with a personal picture. Through guided visualization, students learn how to create mental pictures as they read.

How to Use Imagery in Your Writing

1. Expand and specify. When you say, “She went to her room and sat on her bed,” don’t stop there.
2. Be weird. Don’t be afraid to get a little out there with your descriptions, especially when it comes to similes and metaphors.
3. Use the five senses.

Three steps of LSRT

1. Step 1: Image. The first step is to generate an image.
2. Step 2: Reflect. Then, you would rate the image you just created (1=“no image at all, only thinking of the scenario” and 5=“a perfectly clear and vivid image”), and reflect on the quality and completeness of the image.
3. Step 3: Development.

The Importance of Using Imagery. Because we experience life through our senses, a strong composition should appeal to them through the use of imagery. It allows readers to directly sympathize with characters and narrators as they imagine having the same sense experiences.

Using imagery in your writing means writing tangibly with the five senses: sight, sound, taste, touch, smell. We often see sight and sound in writing, but if you can incorporate the less typical senses, combine them together, and use them creatively, you’ll sculpt a much richer picture for your readers.

Writing an imagery poem is not about taking a photograph with words. Rather, you want the sensory descriptions you use to be ones that make the reader feel the way you want them to feel. Words beginning or ending in hard sounds, such as brick or shut, can evoke more of a cold, closed-off sensation in the reader.

Creating sensory images also helps a reader draw on specific details in the text (e.g. a character’s thoughts, words or actions; elements of tone, meaning or beauty of a text), creating an interaction between the reader and the text.