Marco Polo and Mark Twain are just a couple examples of travel writers who, through their rendition of faraway locations in persuasive prose, radically altered how readers pictured the world. Through descriptions of people encountered and landscapes traversed, travel writers familiarize, exoticize, or destabilize the unknown in order to transform places into cultural significant landmarks in the imagination of their armchair readers. As a genre, travel writing is an excellent illustration of the immediate power of prose and lends itself well to the study of the effective use of words. In this class, we will analyze some signature pieces of this genre as a way to develop our own prose styles. Classwork will consist of discussion of various essays and peer critiques of student writing. Assigned texts: The Best American Travel Writing 2007 ed. Susan Orlean (required) and The Travel Writer’s Handbook by Louise Purwin Zobel (optional)

Texts:

• Ed. Susan Orlean. Best American Travel Writing 2007. Houghton Mifflin. [0618582185]
• Jack Rawlins. The Writer’s Way. Houghton Mifflin. [0618426809]