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