Paper 2: Writing - Travel Writing
English Language: AQA GCSE, topic 6.2.7
Travel Writing
Travel writing is designed to inform people about places. Travel is a personal luxury, so usually, people read travel writing for entertainment. Places and landscapes are visually exciting, so descriptive language is common.
Purpose of travel writing
- Travel writing for guide books like Frommers or Lonely Planet involves listing what there is to do in a country and this kind of writing will often be informative.
- Travel writing for magazines or publications is usually targeted at people who read about travel for leisure. This is more likely to be entertaining.
- Travel writing for adverts (e.g. the Tourist Board of Bahrain) will often be focused on persuasion because they want people to visit Bahrain.
- The purpose of the writing will affect the kind of language used.
Tone and style of travel writing
- Travel writers in a magazine trying to entertain people are likely to use a personal tone, write in the first person to narrate their own experience and may even use humour, puns or cyclic repetition to create a relationship with the reader. These will be informal articles.
- Even travel writing to persuade people to visit a place may be quite informal because most people have an informal mindset and want escapism from a holiday. People want to relax on holiday so a formal tone may not be appropriate.
Features of travel writing
- Lots of descriptive and emotive tone and language to describe the visual and sensory experience.
- A personalised tone and a final recommendation or opinion on the place.
- A title and strapline (that builds on the title) to give the reader an idea of what the piece of travel writing is about.
Test yourself on Paper 2: Writing - Travel Writing
Which of these would be an example of travel writing?