Usually, the inspiration for a traveling essay happens after the trip, but what to do if you need to write it right now and you do not have time to harvest material for a paper? In this article, the professional writers from Coolessay.net will show you how to bring the reader along on the journey, describe little-known facts about the country and infuse the traveling essay with culture and a sense of place.
Before Writing a Traveling Essay: Steps to Take
Writing a traveling essay is like telling a joke to your buddies. You know so many hilarious anecdotes, but when someone asks you to tell one, you completely forget all of them. It is simple and complicated at the same time as traveling essay writing is. Here are some steps you need to take in order to write a winning paper.
Step 1: Choose a Destination for the Travel Essay
Actually, it does not matter whether you are going to write a traveling essay about your trip to Iceland or neighborhood state, it is all about the way you are telling the story. A far-off locate, month-long travel to Japan or just breakfast in an unknown city can be a great subject for your paper, all you need to do is to see and describe this trip through the lens of an explorer rather than a tourist.
If you choose to write about your travel to the huge metropolis like Tokyo or Delhi, one essay will not be enough to cover every single aspect of your journey. So, instead, pick one topic or tourist destination that has astonished you the most and focus on it in depth. For instance, it can be Indian cuisine (street food) or Japanese architecture.
Step 2: Research the Location
Before writing a traveling essay, you need to be familiar with the background of your trip and do some research. Yes, you might know all the great places in this particular city and thousands of amusing stories from locals, but readers are interested in more than just surface information. Learn about the history of the building you are describing in your essay, give us the context for your museum story, add some foreign words and phrases to entertain your reader and get a sense of the city you were in.
Step 3: Include Specifics
When writing a traveling essay, do not just list a series of tourist attractions and restaurants. This is what guidebooks and Instagram profiles are for. To bring the story to life, describe rich visual details of the location that usual tourist does not notice. What were the newspaper headlines when you had arrived? What were people reading in a subway? What were they eating? Jot down all of the details.
Structure of the Traveling Essay and Cliches to Avoid
They say a photo can tell a thousand words, but there are some things that your camera can't capture. When you look at the picture, you are dealing only with a sense of sight. But when you are writing a traveling essay, you always can describe what we are smelling, hearing, and tasting. Is not it one of the advantages we need to take advantage of? So, here is a plan for you to get A+ for traveling essay.
Opening
How would you like this opening? “I had dreamed for years of visiting Vietnam. As our plane circled to land, I gazed out the window at a cluttered city below”. Not so bad but not so great. Why is this a mediocre lead? Well, if you are writing a traveling essay about Vietnam, your opening should set the reader in the middle of the crowded street of this metropolis. In the example above, you are not even in Vietnam, you are still on the airplane, and unless something really crazy is about to have on a plane, this is probably not interesting to readers. You want to jump right into the action. Do not let your back story kill the traveling essay.
What do you think about that kind of opening scene? “The street vendor’s bicycle comes outfitted with a rack of dried squid and a smoldering charcoal grill. He plucks a squid from the rack, heats it over the coal, and serves me my snack with a dollop of chili sauce”. Yes, you have not even told the reader when you are yet. What is the country? What is the continent? It is something that is going to catch people’s attention. From there, you can backtrack and explain where you are, how you got there and why you are there. So, start in the middle of the action.
Once a bestselling author said the perfect phrase you can apply to your traveling essay: “If you can’t be bothered to find a hundred words to engage me with a piece, why would I trust you with a thousand?”
Developing Your Traveling Essay
Stay focused on the story at hand and keep your writing streamlined. Avoid distracting tangents and weed out extraneous details. Common rookie error – we feel like everything we did on a trip was so exciting, but it does not necessarily mean it belongs in the story at hand. Do not be afraid to throw other stuff out.
When you move to the main body, explore the story in detail, using quotations, previous histories on the event or people you were lucky to meet. Give the readers some background, so they can understand what you are talking about. Imagine you are talking to an old friend and describe all of the crazy things that have happened to you. Include a variety of sentence starters. “Next, next, next” is a bad idea.
Too many students make themselves the center of a story when they are not. We would suggest getting out of the way and letting places and people that you meet tell a story for themselves.
The end
Conclude with a lesson, observation or a punch line. Tell about your inner journey. How does travel affect your emotions? What do you discover about yourself or the world?
In the end, we would like to share with you some tips and clichés to avoid in your traveling essay.
Cliches to Avoid
Usually, while you are reading a traveling essay, the city is always “puzzling”, views are always “breathtaking”, “wonderful”, “amazing”, or “beautiful” and water is always “crystal-clear”. A couple more clichés: “friendly locals”, “quaint villages”, “cozy streets”, “a land of contrast”. All of these are just empty words, so cut it out immediately.
We know that “Paris was beautiful”. But you want to get a lot more specific. Say we are going into Mekong Delta in Vietnam. Yes, it is beautiful, but write about the shimmering green rice paddies and the farmers out in there, all the little wooden boats that are chugging through the tributaries of the Mekong, the crunching of oars, and tropical birds serenading you off in the distance.