WRTG 3020 Topics in Writing: Travel Writing
Instructor Contact:
Paula Wenger
Email: paula.wenger@colorado.edu
About the Course:
Whether you’re interested in a travel writing career or would just like to tell your travel stories to friends and family, the course will draw you into your own experiences so that you can draw readers into them, too. All venturing—crossing oceans or crossing the street—can be told as a travel story. Good writers learn from other writers. You will read exemplary travel writing throughout the five weeks of the course. Reading responses will give you the opportunity to zero in on features of professional writing that you would like to weave into your own. The assignments start with the building blocks of travel writing and move into writing an article and creating a blog. Both forms will give you the opportunity to use your own photography.
Course Prerequisites: WRTG 1150 or equivalent
Objectives:
By the end of the course you should be able to:
- Analyze genre conventions and rhetorical techniques of travel writing to apply to your own projects.
- Hone your own writing process, using strategies for generating ideas, drafting and revising your work, and critiquing your own and others’ work.
- Identify publications, writers, and forms that have shaped contemporary travel writing.
- Recognize and apply the critical thinking and research that are foundational to travel writing that matters.
- Produce digital, multimodal media based on analyzing and composing in multiple modes and identifying technologies for circulating your work.
Required Texts:
How to be a Travel Writer
Don George
Published by Lonely Planet July 2017
Purdue Online Writing Lab: https://owl.purdue.edu/owl/purdue_owl.html
Readings on Canvas
Assignments and Grading
Base Story: A story shaped from writing exercises that will serve as the foundation for an article (the Publication Story described below) |
1500-2000 words |
100 points |
Draft of the Publication Story with Rhetorical Analysis (see below) |
1500-2000 words |
50 points |
Publication Story with Rhetorical Analysis: The Base Story shaped to the editorial needs of a particular publication, preceded by a rhetorical analysis of the publication |
1500-2000 words (revised from draft) |
100 points |
Blog Rhetorical Analysis |
As needed |
50 points |
Blog Design and Introductory Post |
300-500 words + visual design |
50 points |
Draft of additional Blog Posts |
1000-1500 words |
50 points |
Blog Final |
1500-2000 words (revised draft posts) |
100 points |
Exercises: Brief writing exercises from How to be a Travel Writer |
12 posts, 200-500 words each |
240 points (20 points each) |
Reading responses: Brief descriptions of features from published readings |
13 responses, 100-200 words each |
130 points (10 points each) |
Comments on peer writing exercise | 4 sets of exercises | 40 points
(10 points each) |
Peer reviews of major writing assignments |
6 reviews |
120 points (20 points each) |
TOTAL possible |
1,030 points |