Methods for Travel Writers

By Charles Mansfield

This methods book is for travel writers and bloggers who are studying to develop their professional and creative practice at university. It is aimed at final year undergraduates and early Masters level postgraduates. Much of the work in developing this book has been drawn from my teaching and research supervision on Masters Programmes for travel writers at universities in Britain, France and Slovenia. Alongside developing your growth and confidence as a literary travel writer it provides an approach that forms the framework for a research project suitable for a postgraduate thesis. For your career, when writing commissions are sought, the book will help you to professionalise your practice so that each new project that you approach is productive from an earlier stage.
Since the UNESCO Convention for the Safeguarding of Intangible Cultural Heritage began to take effect in 2008, travel writers have played an increasingly important role in the curation of cultural activities and practices around the globe. This book helps you take part in that process of exploring, with sensitivity, the places where cultural practices are preserved. Using these teaching materials will provide ways of critically analysing and interpreting the intangible culture and the built heritage encountered in the field when traveling. The activities from the book will enable the preparation and creation of critical commentaries on the discovered practices and artefacts, and the advice will enable writers to understand the management of knowledge through traditional and emerging digital channels. In social media roles, the travel writer's work is often disguised in a job title such as digital content author whilst in the museum world, travel writing is seen as ethnographic interpretation and curation. In 1999 the French Ministry of Culture created the concept of the ethnopôle which has helped better define the professional role of the researcher-writer working in the discovery and mediation of cultural heritage.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Charles Mansfield
• Release date: Oct 3, 2022
• ISBN: 9781838096403

Charles Mansfield

Dr Charlie Mansfield has been a university lecturer since 1995 and taught travel writers at the University of Plymouth in Tourism Management and French, where he was also co-director of the heritage research centre. He completed a major, funded research project for the CNRS with the University of Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne in digital heritage management and was a research academic with the University of Edinburgh from January 2005 until July 2009 where he successfully completed an AHRC-funded research project to digitise mediaeval literary texts. He is an independent researcher and travel writer, regularly running summer schools for literary travel writers and DMOs.

Book preview

Methods for Travel Writers

Copyright 2020 Charlie Mansfield

Published by Travel Writers Online at Smashwords

To cite: Mansfield, C. 2020. Methods for Travel Writers. Totnes: Travel Writers Online.

ISBN 978-1-8380964-0-3 without spaces 9781838096403

Date of original publication 10.9.20

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About this Book

This methods book is for travel writers and bloggers who are studying to develop their professional and creative practice at university. It is aimed at final year undergraduates and early Masters level postgraduates. Much of the work in developing this book has been drawn from my teaching and research supervision on Masters Programmes for travel writers at universities in Britain, France and Slovenia. Alongside developing your growth and confidence as a literary travel writer it provides an approach that forms the framework for a research project suitable for a postgraduate thesis. For your career, when writing commissions are sought, the book will help you to professionalise your practice so that each new project that you approach is productive from an earlier stage.

Professional Practice in Travel Writing and Heritage Interpretation

Since the UNESCO Convention for the Safeguarding of Intangible Cultural Heritage began to take effect in 2008, travel writers have played an increasingly important role in the curation of cultural activities and practices around the globe. This book helps you take part in that process of exploring, with sensitivity, the places where cultural practices are preserved. Using these teaching materials will provide ways of critically analysing and interpreting the intangible culture and the built heritage encountered in the field when traveling. The activities from the book will enable the preparation and creation of critical commentaries on the discovered practices and artefacts, and the advice will enable writers to understand the management of knowledge through traditional and emerging digital channels. In social media roles, the travel writer's work is often disguised in a job title such as digital content author whilst in the museum world, travel writing is seen as ethnographic interpretation and curation. In 1999 the French Ministry of Culture created the concept of the ethnopôle which has helped better define the professional role of the researcher-writer working in the discovery and mediation of cultural heritage.

Writing Practice in Higher Education

The Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education in the UK, offers key skills for writing graduates that are helpful as you start to think about what your writing practice will do, it will:

Produce clear, accurate, artistically coherent and technically sophisticated written work, which articulates a combination of research and creative ideas.

Respond to the affective power of language, using appropriate approaches,

terminology and creative strategies.

Use language in a sophisticated and nuanced fashion, with a heightened awareness

of concision, voice, idiom, idiolect, simile, metaphor, analogy, rhythm and

media-specific restraints.

Use reflective strategies to help capture and synthesize personal experiences and

other research in an imaginative form.

Apply a well-developed aesthetic sensibility and sense of intellectual inquiry.

And further, the graduates will:-

View themselves as practitioners and reflect critically on their own creative writing practice.

Conduct independent research including that which is practice-based.

From: QAA (2016) Section 3.2 pp.8-9

The literary travel writer's methodology

My post-doctoral research identified methods used in literary travel writing, which I detail below, and which can be used as a basis for writing projects. However, to become a methodology these methods need to form part of a critical inquiry. To move towards a research methodology the methods can be posed as questions to the place under study so that the literary travel writer collects data in response to these questions. Rather than techniques, each method is applied whilst asking the research question 'What does this method tell me about the place, the people or the practices here?' The methods listed here, underpinned with the theoretical understanding that the book offers, provide a firm basis for you to reproduce your writing practices in new situations whilst maintaining a quality that satisfies your stakeholders and maintains your own motivation through a measurable range of accomplishments.

A further use for narrative travel writing in research is as the outcome, the final write-up that will have a public impact through its accessibility and its affect. This means that in leisure and well-being research the collection and analysis can follow ethnographic practices. One example, is interviewing other tourists to determine their emotions using a model, for example, the DRAMMA model, detailed below. Alternatively, an auto-ethnography can be written during and immediately after the walking experience to collect emotional changes and feelings of well-being and emancipation, along with memories drawn from the author's own cultural capital. Riffaterre (2002) argues for a specific genre of travel or place writing, which he helpfully names as