Improve your Travel Writing

As travel writers, we need to create content that is descriptive enough to transport our readers to a location or helping them imagine the encounters with people you’ve met. Your readers need to be able to experience the scene you’re sharing with them, so they can connect with your writing.

This article is the first in a series of articles about your five senses. We’ll look at each sense, and see how you can use it to improve your travel writing.

Sense of Sight

Ineffective travel writers struggle to translate what they see into words, and revert to using non-descriptive bland statements like “beautiful,” “nice,” or “amazing,” which only describes the value of what they see, not actually what is in front of them. This approach provides very little value to your reader, leaving them none the wiser to what you’re describing.

When looking at person, place, or thing, it can be overwhelming to know where to start the descriptive process. The best approach is to scan what you’re looking at and breaking down what you see into individual elements before trying to assign a value to it.

Examples of Sight Elements:

• Age
• Location
• Proximity
• Body
• Stance
• Color
• Size
• Shape
• Composition
• Symmetry
• Comparison to something else
• Unusual Characteristics
• Height/Width/Depth

If you imagine you’re describing what you see to someone who is blind, it can help you to pick out the details that are important to convey.

Take a look at this example from Fodor’s page about Florence:

Florence’s is a subtle beauty—its staid, unprepossessing palaces built in local stone are not showy, even though they are very large. They take on a certain magnificence when day breaks and when the sun sets; their muted colors glow in this light. A walk along the Arno offers views that don’t quit and haven’t much changed in 700 years; navigating Piazza della Signoria, always packed with tourists, requires patience. There’s a reason why everyone seems to be here, however. It’s the heart of the city, and home to the Uffizi—the world’s finest repository of Italian Renaissance art.

This excerpt includes an effective balance of show and tell. If it was all show, then it would read like a literary journal, so as travel writers we need to find that subtle balance between telling facts quickly to move the reader through our article and peppering our paragraphs with words that evoke an emotional reaction.

Imagine if this first show and tell paragraph:

• Florence’s is a subtle beauty—its staid, unprepossessing palaces built in local stone are not showy, even though they are very large. They take on a certain magnificence when day breaks and when the sun sets; their muted colors glow in this light.

was written as all tell:

• Florence is beautiful, with large unprepossessing stone palaces, which are lovely at sunrise and sunset.

What’s the chances that the reader would click off the page to visit another site, or choose another book to read?

If you’ve written or come across a travel article that uses the sense of sight effectively, please add the links to the comments below.

The above content is an excerpt from my Five Senses Travel Journal

For more articles in this fives senses series:

• Improve your travel writing with your sense of sight
• Improve your travel writing with your sense of smell
• Improve your travel writing with your sense of hearing
• Improve your travel writing with your sense of taste
• Improve your travel writing with your sense of touch