If you fancy winning yourself a two hundred quid voucher from Hotels.com (redeemable in any of 260,000 establishments worldwide), then you should click along to "The Guardian's" website and, in no more one hundred words, offer your travel tip for Mallorca. The paper does this sort of thing regularly. There are tips, among other places, for Buenos Aires, Cuba and Sri Lanka, and now it's the turn of Mallorca. "From beautiful beaches to remote mountains, Mallorca is one of the Med's most beautiful islands." This is the blurb under the announcement for the tips. It is not totally inaccurate, but the wording is drivel. Is it so difficult to avoid using "beautiful" twice in the same sentence? It would appear that it is.
"The Guardian", being as "The Guardian" is, attracts a generally literate and quite sophisticated readership. (Or one presumes so.) It is a readership which, when presented with the opportunity to trouser a couple of centuries, arouses itself into a state of being a wannabe travel writer. The same, it should be said, would apply to several other newspapers, so I'm not just picking on "The Guardian", but it would be safe to assume that the top tips that emanate from this paper will not be including ones for going mamading in Magalluf written in a direct and graphic style but will be including vignettes that reveal hidden coves and charming and unexpected villages. Oh dear.
As wannabe travel writers, and someone from "Lonely Planet" is the judge, there is a formula to follow. It is the one of actual travel writers. Some of them at any rate. And some of whom would be best advised to never travel ever again and certainly not write about their experiences. These are the ones who share with writers of travel brochures an affliction of lexical limpness: a default desire, through sheer idleness (or so it would seem), to indulge themselves in diarrhoeal descriptions replete with adjectives and superlatives of the obvious and the repetitious.
In order to overcome this affliction, I have compiled a compendium of words that should on no account ever be used when describing anything to do with Mallorca. Well, maybe not ever used, but only as a last resort. Do feel free to add to them. There will be others. Here they are ...
Authentic. Awesome. Azure. Beautiful. Blue. Breathtaking. Buzzing. Centuries-old. Charismatic. Charming. Chic. City (or town or island) of contrasts. Crystal-clear. Dazzling. Delicious. Delightful. Deserted. Dream-like. Enchanting. Exciting. Exotic. Fantastic. Golden. Hidden. Lively. Lovely. Luxurious. Magnificent. Oasis. Oozing (for example, history). Phenomenal. Pleasant. Precious. Quaint. Real. Remote. Romantic. Rustic. Shimmering. Spectacular. Strange. Stunning. Superb. Surprise. Traditional. Turquoise. Typical. Undiscovered. Unexpected. Unspoiled. Unusual. Velvety-white (as in sands). Wonderful.
Going back to the blurb in "The Guardian", it includes two of the words in this forbidden list. "Beautiful" is so overused that it has lost any meaning or any power. Yet, the paper manages to use it two times. Lazy? Just a bit. Then there is "remote". The mountains of Mallorca are remote? Are they really? Mallorca isn't that big a place for anything to be remote. There may be remote parts of mountain ranges, but mountains' lack of remoteness is such that you can often find yourself right next to one or indeed on it.
It isn't easy, it must be said, to avoid the forbidden words. Even generally good articles can fall into the trap. Here is the author Helen Walsh from "The Guardian" last October: "S’Amarador has to be one of the most beautiful beaches on the island. Enclosed by pines and ancient, crenellated rock, this is the quintessential “postcard” beach that tourists can never find. At this time of year, with the best part of six months’ sunshine warming its turquoise shallows, the sea is lukewarm – almost body temperature."
A "beautiful", a "turquoise", and "quintessential" is a good one to add to the list. I'm not sure how the sea qualifies as being lukewarm if it is almost 37 degrees Celsius, but let's not be too picky: overall, the article wasn't bad.
The trouble is that a great deal is bad. Someone penning a hundred words for a newspaper review can of course be forgiven for adopting clichés or platitudes, but others cannot be. The writing has to be seen in the same way as Mallorca's marketing is. The island's offers are those of many parts of the Mediterranean. The marketing has, therefore, to transcend that of other destinations. It has to have a voice which creates an impression of uniqueness, even if this uniqueness doesn't exist. Writing about the island has to do the same. It is no good saying that beaches are beautiful, because this is a banality trotted out everywhere else.
Just as the marketing should be thoughtful and creative, so should the writing. Maybe there should be a competition.
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