ZUM STIL IM MEDIENFORMAT REISEBLOG
THE WRITING STYLE IN TRAVEL BLOGS

Summary/Abstract: Travelling was one of the most popular activities already in the times of Homer, and so it remains today, in the digital era. The world has become a global village, allowing travellers to explore even the most secluded destinations on earth. A popular means to get information about an upcoming trip is the travel blog. 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. Since the development of the Internet and the digital media, we have found ourselves in an era of globalized information. This radically influences our relationships and forms of communication. The Internet is used to retrieve information and to communicate. Among the most popular communication tools on the Internet are e-mails, news sites, chats, now also blogs, vlogs, and social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. In the times of Web 2.0, certain writing tendencies have developed that have strongly influenced communication. One of the issues raised because of Web 2.0 is that of the language style: How to define a style that has evolved as a result of different social networks? Storrer (2018) speaks of “interactioncentered writing” (interaktionsorientiertes Schreiben), which initially takes place in a digital communication environment and attaches great importance to the comprehensibility of texts. The success of the ongoing social interaction (ibid. 228) being the focus of interaction-centered writing, the deviations from the standard language in travel blogs must be evaluated differently. Characteristic of travel blogs is the imitation of spoken language in written texts (ibid. 232), which helps maintain social closeness between people. With the Internet new digital media settings were developed, but no special language. However, the Internet is a hybrid medium, because it consists of a wide variety of digital media settings, such as blogs, forums, dictionaries, and presentation pages of companies, universities, etc. The heterogeneous platforms target different social groups (children, young people, adults, specific professional groups and pensioners), and they also differ in terms of the language used (Marx/Weidacher 91). Our analysis of the German travel blogs “We travel the World”, “Komm, wir machen das einfach” and “Wir sind dann mal weg”, has shown that the writing style typical of a blog coincides with the blog’s function. Travel blogs are predominantly used for self-portraying, expressing one’s opinion, documenting one’s experiences and advertising. Since the development of the Internet, new stylistic forms have arisen, but no new language. The forms of expression and formulation patterns used in travel blogs are shaped by the technical and physical conditions of the media format. Certain topic-specific (in this case, travel-related) phenomena are also present. In addition to the travel-related vocabulary, foreign expressions are often used. The most common among them are Anglicisms, but expressions from other languages, such as Spanish and French, are also common. The combination of English and German is not rare either. The usage of travelrelated and foreign expressions has now become part of everyday language and is intended to ensure that travel blog posts appear up-to-date and modern. Based on the analysis of several examples, we have observed two functional writing styles within the framework of the selected travel blogs: the literary and the journalistic style. Weblogs, as well as travel blogs, are in some respects reminiscent of diaries. The entries are arranged chronologically and describe the authors’ personal experiences, which often intertwine with their opinions. At the moment, bloggers want to talk about their travels, experiences, and their lives in general. Nevertheless, a big difference can be observed between a diary and a travel blog. Modern travel blogs are written for large audiences: they are therefore designed for publication. Another aspect that should be emphasized is the up-to-dateness of (travel) blogs. The World Wide Web, and even more the social media, give their users the opportunity to follow the bloggers’ experiences (almost) in real time, and thus to take part in the journey while sitting on the couch. What the literary and journalistic styles have in common is entertainment. Bloggers want to use their style of language to attract as many readers as possible, while using language to present themselves and express their emotions. Accordingly, their writing style is expressive, playful, and creative. This is achieved through a range of linguistic forms and means, such as the paratactic sentence structure, expressive verbs, adjectives, and adverbs. The narrative past tense is typical of the literary style and can usually be found in travel blogs as well; travel blog posts can, however, also be written in the present tense, giving the reader the feeling that they are on the trip, and enabling them to follow the reports in real time. In the days of Web 2.0, there is a specific aspect of writing that needs to be considered in every analysis of computer-mediated communication: the interaction-centered writing (Storrer 2018). The contact with the readers is extremely important, so the language is designed to be interactive. The spoken, improvised language can be imitated in several ways: by using particles, eliding parts of sentences, shortening words, omitting sounds, etc. Bloggers want to inform their followers as well as they can, but because of today's 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 analysed, 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.

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