Description  

Common structures for descriptive essays are chronological order and narrative structure. These structures are also suitable for identifying, defining, or outlining a topic or idea. You can think of yourself as telling a story to your readers; keep asking yourself what else they need to know in order to get the whole story. If time is involved, the essay can be organized around repeatedly asking, “so, what happened next?”. 

Many writers find it helpful to focus on organizing such essays to answer the basic journalistic questions, “Who? What? Where? When? Why? How?”. You should be mindful that most instructors will not be satisfied with simply knowing your opinion about these questions, but will also want to know why and how you came to that opinion. While portions of an essay may be descriptive, it is rarely appropriate for an entire assignment to follow a narrative structure.