Travelling plays an important role in the life of every person; it makes it diverse, bright, filled with new, previously untested impressions and emotions. You can share travel experiences through writing travel essays. The style of the travel essay is original, unusual and interesting. In this genre, both professional journalists and novices in journalism can write if they take into account the structural features of this genre:
- Brevity and at the same time pithy. It is necessary to present in a rather concise form the maximum possible amount of information about the last journey and the emotions received during it.
- Description of real events. Fiction in the genre of travel essay is not valid. You can refer to sources on the Internet, such as web sites, for example, www.amblesideprimary.com to gather information for writing a travel essay, but in this case, it will lose individuality and uniqueness. Only real events and facts that you personally observed during the trip will make the essay that you have written colourful and memorable.
- An essay is socially useful and informative. It will be useful for people reading your travel essay to get the information you provide. Someone will be interested to learn about the life contribution and traditions of the country in which they have not been but plan to visit in the near future. Or your essay will be so interesting that people, having read it, will want to visit the place about which you wrote.
- Filling the text with beautiful metaphors and phrases. The presence of sensuality, emotion, brightness.
- Modernity. No need to describe in a travel essay events from the distant past or future.
Choosing a theme travel essay
The process of choosing a theme for writing a travel essay is important and difficult. Firstly, because it is fundamental, the whole process of writing, the choice of style, the target audience, to which the work will be directed, depends on the chosen theme. Secondly, when choosing a theme, it is necessary to take into account the fact that the essay should include problems affecting not only the author personally but also society as a whole so that it is interesting to read it not only to a narrow circle of people.
Choosing a theme for writing a travel essay, determine for yourself what question you can reveal most fully and clearly. Anything can be the theme – a historical monument, a conversation with a resident of the country to which you travelled, cultural peculiarities and traditions, a national flavour expressed in clothes, dances, songs – http://www.bbc.com/travel/cultural-traditions.
The process of writing a travel essay
When writing any type of work it is very important to make a plan, this will greatly facilitate the workflow. First, you need to decide for whom you are writing your essay. This will help determine the style in which you will write. Then decide for yourself what exactly you want to convey to readers, what you want to share – the beautiful and amazing places, struck your imagination, cultural and social structure of the countries you visited, unusual traditions or political structure and features of social life.
A prerequisite when writing a travel essay is to have your own experience. Of course, you need to read the articles of other authors who write in the same style, but only in order to gain some experience and evaluate their style. But it is very important to attract readers by describing their impressions and emotions received during a visit to another country, to describe only what you have seen, heard and tried.
During your stay in another country, make notes, record everything that you think is interesting and unusual. Take the photos of everything around – people, architectural structures, trees, plants, birds, animals. In one word everything that you see around. When the journey is over and you return home, your impressions will cool down a bit, something may be erased from memory, and in this case, the photos taken during the trip will help you refresh your memories and revive your emotions.
Do not be afraid to describe everything in contrast. No matter how positive the impressions of the last trip or journey, but there are always negative aspects. Describe them also in your travel essay.
It is necessary to write a travel essay so that readers feel the development of events from the beginning of the journey to the very end.