English at Brockington
A Guide to Year 9
Travel Writing
Topic Overview
In Year 9 your first topic of study is Travel Writing. You will begin by looking at pieces of travel writing and evaluating how they are effective to make you wish to go to the location. With this knowledge you will then begin to write your own.
With this your topic of interest will turn to how holidays can go wrong. How they are not these picturesque locations that the brochures would suggest. Now you will turn to making letters of complaint.
Skills
One of the key things studied in this unit is writing for purpose - i.e. you have to think: "What am I writing?" - "Does that mean I should write formally or informally?", "Should I keep it short and snappy or longer and more informative?” With letters of complaint, you need to be somewhat harsh to get your point across, but you do not want to directly insult the recipient or they will simply ignore you. Travel Writing has to be interesting to all, so you need to keep it descriptive yet still engaging, full of images but not too many that they're distracting.
Recommended Reading:
Before you begin this topic, I would recommend you read into holiday destinations in order to prepare you for writing about a holiday. You need to know what sort of things make a good holiday so reading into what people enjoy will certainly help. If possible, you should try to find advertisements and reviews of these destinations. You should then be able to judge what style of writing is used in to promote the holiday.
Finding publicised reports of and letters of complaint over holidays may be quite difficult, but if there are ever any famous accounts of this, then read through them and look at how the writer writes persuasively in order to get the compensation they want.
