Class Feature: Travel Writing

Many students at the University of Rhode Island believe that to meet the English Communication requirements of their general education, they must take either WRT 104 or WRT 106. They do not know that there are quite a few other classes that meet this requirement as well, some of which may be more appealing than research writing or writing to inform and explain.

Travel Writing, WRT 305, is one such class that meets the English Communication requirements. It is described in the URI course catalog as “Writing about places both new and familiar. Emphasizes descriptive techniques, the use of facts, and different cultural perspectives. May include travel essays, place journals, guide-books, query letters.”

Professor Heather Johnson has taught this course for the past six to seven years now. She said that the Writing and Rhetoric Department introduced this course and others because they were interested in different kinds of writing for different kinds of publics.

“Travel writing is very much about the writer encountering space and place and getting people to be awake to the world around them,” Johnson said. She stresses in her class that her students should try to go out and experience something new. In her class, she wants her students “to be able to vividly describe their surroundings… to be able to, after the course, notice more and not be numb to the world.”

It’s a different kind of writing that focuses on developing a capacity for insight. Johnson wants her students to be able to reflect on the world around them and craft a piece of work that allows for other people to experience an “armchair traveler’s experience”.

In this course, there are four major assignments that the students must complete, according to Johnson. They embody writing about something that the students wouldn’t normally have discovered otherwise. Johnson’s view is that “it’s easy for us to use the portal of our phones to see other worlds, but to see the world right in front of you can be quite interesting,” which is something that she hopes to inspire in her course.

Many unexpected things have come out of this class for students, according to Johnson; from a random bike ride that brought two siblings closer together to getting an impromptu tattoo, this course is able to make unexpected things happen just by the act of traveling and experiencing the world around you.

John Kiernan, a student who has taken Johnson’s Travel Writing course, said this course exceeded his expectations. “[This course] taught me to write and think about myself in an entirely different manner than I was used to,” he Kiernan. “College trains us to write reports and research papers, but we often neglect to learn (or relearn) to write about ourselves and our experiences.”

This course is not a memoir writing course, nor is it travel guide writing. Johnson explained this course as being “about this particular person going to this particular place which cannot be replicated. It’s a completely new experience.” This course is meant to help students learn how to express what they are experiencing, so that others who read their writing can experience it along with them.

Kyle Sankey, a French and writing and rhetoric double major, has also taken Johnson’s course. Sankey said that “the assignments [in this course] challenged us to experience the tangibility of life through space… The focus wasn’t only on space but on our reactions, sensations and emotions and how they shape our perspective in reality.”

Both students said they enjoyed taking this class and that their writing skills had improved thanks to the course. It is not a typical writing course, so for those who want to get away from the “traditional” this course is a good spot. Johnson said she tells her students not to think about their grades in the class but to think of how best to create an insightful piece of writing of the world around them.

This course is offered in both the fall and spring semesters and has no prerequisites.