How to Teach Students to Be Travel Writers

Teaching students how to be travel writers first involves training them to notice and observe things from a fresh perspective. While creative writing techniques might encourage them to cultivate a magical "what if?" travel writing requires that writers take what is actually around and in front of them and portray it with a concise vividness. Readers should almost feel as though a mental photograph of what the writer describes has formed in their heads.

Instructions

1

Ask students to look around the classroom that they are sitting in as if they have seen it for the first time. Tell them to describe it in a paragraph. Have each student read his paragraph to the class, and discuss which ones were more effective.

2

Show students a large photograph of Mount Everest. Tell students that each of them have just climbed to the summit. Tell them to describe their experience in a paragraph, but do not let them use commonly used words to describe mountains like big, enormous, high, grand, majestic, amazing and so on. Ask students to share their writing when finished.

3

Tell students that they've found a wonderful restaurant in a new city. Ask students to make a short list of suitable people who work in the restaurant to interview and the questions they would ask. Have them share their answers.

4

Ask students what the phrase "a heightened sense of awareness" means. Ask them to give examples and explain why such a skill is beneficial for a travel writer.

5

Give students homework to "get lost" in their own town and explore it with a heightened sense of awareness. Each student must make three discoveries of things they hadn't known about before such as a restaurant, bar, park, cafe, fountain, museum, shop or theater. Tell them to write about each discovery in detail.

6

Ask students about the importance of talking to local people in a new place and a safe way to do so. Elicit a list of do's and don'ts from the students. For example, "Do talk to people of all ages" and "Don't talk to people who look drunk or angry."

7

Give students a list of periodicals that publish travel stories. Discuss the appropriate and professional way to query or pitch a story to a periodical. Hand out examples of an example query letter.

8

Tell students to pick a periodical and to write a query letter for homework. The following day, examine all the letters as a class and discuss effective versus less effective tactics and stories that these periodical would be more likely to accept.