One of the most common types of travel writing is the feature. These will appear most frequently in travel magazines, newspapers, and blogs. They can include everything from the Journey to the Personal, from How To to Opinion. The key to a feature is to discover an angle or unique perspective. You might spend all term trying to find an angle that you can use for your travels and might not really see it until you are writing the piece, so be patient.

Features are almost always longform, and they require not only an original angle, but a bit more detail about the place than some other types of writing. While you certainly can shift the slider on how personal or philosophical, the travel feature should be at least 50% about the place. In travel publications, Feature assignments often are either Destination (more informative) or Journey (more like a travelogue) types of pieces, but you have a lot of freedom.

Your assignment

You will write a travel Feature that an audience looking to visit where you are writing about would be interested in. You will note in the Samples that there are a variety of different approaches, and the Travelogue or Personal Article assignments are also types of travel Features, so you shouldn’t feel constrained by genre. What you need to do that makes this difficult (much like the How To) is that you have to find some unique angle that a reader is interested in. Avoid the general, “Study abroad in France changed me forever,” because those are plentiful and not very interesting. Instead, focus your ruminations on place or the people who inhabit those places, and share details and atmosphere about the places. Be inventive. Write about your explorations of the 32 public parks of Denver or urban wildlife. While it can follow a linear narrative, it doesn’t have to. It can cobble together multiple stories. If you are a person who needs a word count, stick to something that is between 1,000 and 2,500 words. However, I welcome longer pieces that really dive deep. I want you to treat this assignment to be the locus of everything you learned in the class.

1. When you are done, compose/paste into a New Post on the Writing Adventures blog.
2. Select Feature from the Categories
3. Write in your Tag. If you are using more than one tag, separate them with a comma.
4. Select Publish.
5. Await your Editorial Review task. Complete your review of your peers’ work.
6. After you receive your review comments from me and your peers, revise your work and change it on the Writing Adventures blog.