Travel Writing
English Language: Edexcel IGCSE - Specification B, topic 4.1.8
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 Travel Writing
Which of these would be an example of travel writing?