Speaking: Descriptive Language Techniques

Part 2 cue cards very often ask you to describe something — a person, a place, an object, an event — and the quality of that description has a direct, disproportionate effect on your Lexical Resource score, since description is precisely the kind of task that either showcases a genuinely varied vocabulary or exposes a heavy reliance on a small handful of overused general adjectives. The specific mistake pattern worth naming here is reaching automatically for words like 'nice', 'good', 'interesting', or 'beautiful' to cover almost any positive description, regardless of what's actually being described — a person, a meal, a building, and a holiday all get flattened into the same three or four adjectives, which does very little to demonstrate range and gives the examiner almost nothing specific to picture.

The most fundamental technique is trading general adjectives for specific, sensory detail. 'The market was interesting' tells a listener almost nothing concrete; 'the market was busy and colourful, with vendors calling out prices and the smell of fresh bread drifting from a nearby stall' gives sound, smell, movement, and colour — a scene a listener can actually picture, built from roughly the same grammatical complexity as the flat version. The technique here isn't reaching for rare or difficult vocabulary; it's simply choosing detail from one of the five senses, or from concrete visual specifics, rather than defaulting to a vague evaluative adjective that could apply to almost anything.

For describing a person specifically, the biggest jump in quality usually comes from moving past physical appearance into mannerism, character, and specific remembered behaviour. 'She's a good listener' is a flat character judgement; 'she has this way of tilting her head when she's really listening to you' describes a specific, visualisable habit that implies the same underlying character trait far more vividly, and does so through concrete, narrated behaviour rather than an abstract label. The same logic applies to describing personality more broadly — rather than 'he's very funny', something like 'he's got this deadpan way of delivering a joke that catches you off guard every time' shows the trait through description of how it actually manifests, rather than simply naming it.

Comparison and contrast is a second concrete technique, especially useful for describing places. Rather than describing a place in isolation, contrasting it with somewhere more familiar gives a listener an immediate reference point: 'it felt completely different from any city I'd visited before, much quieter despite being so large' communicates more about the specific quality of the place — the unexpected quietness relative to its size — than a standalone adjective like 'quiet' or 'peaceful' would on its own, because the comparison implicitly explains why that quietness stood out as noteworthy in the first place.

A third technique is using a specific action or narrated moment to imply a quality, rather than stating the quality directly. Instead of 'the café was cosy', describing a specific sensory moment — 'the walls are covered in old photographs, and it always smells like fresh coffee the moment you walk in' — lets the listener infer 'cosy' themselves from concrete evidence, which almost always reads as more vivid and more convincing than the adjective stated on its own, even when the adjective is also included afterward as a summary word. This same technique works for objects, too: rather than calling an old bicycle 'well used', describing the specific chipped paint on the frame and the slightly worn leather seat lets the listener arrive at that same impression through concrete visual detail instead of a flat evaluative label.