Journaling and Blogging

While on the trip, you will be required to journal daily and blog once. Expectations are as follows:

Journaling: On a trip like this, with a packed itinerary and surrounded by friends, it can be really hard to make the time to write. However, anyone who has traveled can tell you that the travel journal ends up being the most sacred memento from the experience. I've had trips on which I didn't write down my daily experiences; I really regret this now, as the memories have ebbed over the years. The journals I do have, however, keep those trips remarkably fresh in my mind.

A good trip journal generally involves two steps. First, over the course of the day, jot down things that you see, that you hear, that you smell, etc. These can - and probably should - just be fragments, a quick list of specific details. The greater specificity, the better. Try to get exact quotes from people, the precise wording on signs, the historical details the tour guides provide. This is one of the reasons for the little journal we gave you - it's easy to carry during the day and allows for quick bulletpoints.

Then, that evening, go through your list of details and try to assemble them into a narrative. Your story will be much richer because of the specifics that you have to plug in. We have given you some journaling topics in your daily itinerary to get your wheels spinning, but you're free to write about the things that interest you.

Your journal is private; we're not going to make you turn it in. But, we are interested in seeing what you have written, so when you return to Tesseract we will ask you to select three different entries - using whatever criteria you wish - which you will then type up, edit, and polish until they fully capture the story you're looking to tell. These three entries will be worth 30 points.

Blogging: On the day you are assigned to blog, you will be responsible for providing a complete summary of the day's events. This certainly includes a description of all major sights that we visited. In addition, though, you are welcome to include personal stories, random encounters, and other general hilarity. Try to capture the tone of the day, the feeling of being on the road, and also to integrate your voice into the piece. In other words, this shouldn't be a dry summary of facts. Make it interesting.

The challenge with this sort of writing is balancing the personal details with the historical ones. If you're not sure what this looks like, there are all sorts of websites devoted to travel writing that you could check out before you go. I've posted accounts of my recent trips in Turkey and Central America, and for all their flaws they may give you some idea of how to navigate between history and your story.