THE WRITING STYLE IN TRAVEL BLOGS

Abstract

This paper focuses on the writing style in travel blogs. Its aim is to research stylistic forms typical of travel blog entries and their contribution to the functions of the travel blog as a whole. In the theoretical part of the paper, we present the characteristic features of a travel blog and the language trends in the digital age. Travel blogs have been defined as digital media settings. Blogs were once defined as websites that included bloggers’ entries and were regularly updated. They were often compared to personal journals. Today blogs have a rather complex structure and they fulfil several functions: bloggers can use their writing to stand out from the crowd, to share their experiences, opinions, once-private thoughts, and even to create a source of income. As a result, blogs are becoming increasingly sophisticated. Furthermore, travel blogs fulfil a variety of functions: the self-portraying, informative, entertaining, evaluative, advertising, instructive, and communicative function. Bloggers want to inform their followers as well as they can, but because of todays flood of information on the web, they must be careful not to let their followers drown in information. Blogs are thus characterized by syntactic compression. In the travel blogs we have analyzed, this is achieved through various linguistic means, such as nominalizations, the usage of infinitival constructions, elisions, and the usage of passive structures. These means fulfil several functions at the same time: they both convey information and help the bloggers maintain the contact with their followers. Finally, it should be noted that the present stylistic analysis has been carried out on a sample of only three travel blogs; its results should therefore not be used as a basis for generalizations. To comprehensively describe and systematize the communicative and functional aspects of the travel blog format, a larger data set consisting of several travel blogs should be analysed. In the upcoming doctoral dissertation, we are going to focus on aspects of this media format which have been only briefly mentioned in the present paper. Among them are multimodal resources, mediality, the interaction between bloggers and readers, the effect of bloggers' network on the individual text modules, and the role of embedding other semiotic resources such as videos.