Name:

Please A paper copy of your own travel writing to your first English
hand in the Language and Literature lesson in week 1.
following:

St Brendan’s Sixth Form College – English Language and Literature Transition Task

In order to give you a brief introduction to A Level English Language and Literature and
an indication of what it will be like to study this course for the next two years, we would like
you to complete some pre-enrolment tasks. The details are as shown below:

Task 1: Context Research. Follow each of these links and make notes on the following
questions.
1. Who is Bill Bryson?
2. What type of writing is he well known for? What subjects does he write about?
3. What do critics say about his writing?
4. What is the aim of travel writing? What different types of travel writing do you know?
5. What are the key elements of travel writing?
https://www.bbc.com/bitesize/guides/zqtwnbk/revision/9 (An easy way into travel writing and Bill
Bryson)
http://www.traveller.com.au/a-walk-in-the-woods-travel-writer-bill-bryson-describes-his-road-to-
success-gix123
https://www.wanderlust.co.uk/content/10-tips-for-writing-travel-articles/

Task 2:
Read the following extract from Bill Bryson’s ‘Neither Here Nor There: Travels in Europe’

Extract from Bill Bryson’s ‘Neither Here Nor There: Travels in Europe’
 In the morning I got up early and went for a long walk through the sleeping streets. I love to
watch cities wake up, and Paris wakes up more abruptly, more startlingly, than any place I
know. One minute you have the city to yourself: it’s just you and a guy delivering crates of
bread, and a couple of droning street-cleaning machines. (It might be worth noting here that
Paris spends £58 a year a head on street-cleaning compared with £17 a head in London,
which explains why Paris gleams and London is a toilet). Then all at once it’s frantic: cars
and buses swishing past in sudden abundance, cafés and kiosks opening, people flying out
of Metro stations like flocks of startled birds, movement everywhere, thousands and
thousands of pairs of hurrying legs.
By half-past eight Paris is a terrible place for walking. There’s too much traffic. A blue haze
of uncombusted diesel hangs over every boulevard. I know Baron Haussmann made Paris a
grand place to look at, but the man had no concept of traffic flow. At the Arc de Triomphe
alone thirteen roads come together. Can you imagine that? I mean to say, here you have a
city with the world’s most pathologically aggressive drivers – drivers who in other
circumstances would be given injections of thorazine from syringes the size of bicycle pumps
and confined to their beds with leather straps – and you give them an open space where
they can all try to go in any of thirteen directions at once. Is that asking for trouble or what?
It’s interesting to note that the French have had this reputation for bad driving since long
before the invention of the internal combustion engine. Even in the eighteenth century British
travellers to Paris were remarking on what lunatic drivers the French were, on ‘the
astonishing speed with which the carriages and people moved through the streets… It was
not an uncommon sight to see a child run over and probably killed. ‘I quote from The Grand
Tour by Christopher Hibbert, a book whose great virtue is in pointing out that the peoples of
Europe have for at least 300 years been living up to their stereotypes. As long ago as the
sixteenth century, travellers were describing the Italians as voluble, unreliable and
hopelessly corrupt, the Germans as gluttonous, the Swiss as irritatingly officious and tidy,
the French as well, insufferably French.
You also constantly keep coming up against these monumental squares and open spaces
that are all but impossible to cross on foot. My wife and I went to Paris on our honeymoon
and foolishly tried to cross the Place de la Concorde without first leaving our names at the
embassy. Somehow she managed to get to the obelisk in the centre, but I was stranded in
the midst of a circus maximus of killer automobiles, waving weakly to my dear spouse of two
days and whimpering softly while hundreds and hundreds of little buff-coloured Renaults
were bearing down on me with their drivers all wearing expressions like Jack Nicholson in
Batman.
It still happens now. At the Place de la Bastille, a vast open space dominated on its north-
eastern side by a glossy new structure that I supposed to be the Paris branch of the
Bradford and Bingley Building Society but which proved upon closer inspection to be the
new Paris opera house, I spent three-quarters of an hour trying to get from the Rue de Lyon
to the Rue de St-Antoine. The problem is that the pedestrian-crossing lights have been
designed with the clear purpose of leaving the foreign visitor confused, humiliated and, if all
goes to plan, dead.
This is what happens: you arrive at a square to find all the traffic stopped, but the pedestrian
light is red and you know that if you venture so much as a foot off the kerb all the cars will
surge forward and turn you into a gooey crêpe. So you wait. After a minute, a blind person
comes along and crosses the great cobbled plain without hesitating. Then a ninety-year old
lady in a motorized wheelchair trundles past and wobbles across the cobbles to the other
side of the square a quarter of a mile away.

Task 3: Glossary Knowing the key terms will enable you to be able to analyse a text. Complete the
table using an online dictionary.
 Literary features

Feature Definition
Personification A type of metaphor that brings human qualities, actions,
emotions or attributes to non-human things.

First person viewpoint

Simile

Alliteration

Hyperbole

Triadic structures

(tripling)
Synecdoche

Irony

Non-literary features

Feature Definition
Adjectives Words that are used to describe nouns. They can be
before the noun (attributive) or after the noun (predicative)

Noun phrase

Verb phrase

Adverbs

Prepositions

First person pronoun

Direct address

Interrogative sentences
(including rhetorical)

Task 4:
Use the glossary to annotate Bryson’s text.
Task 5:

Write your own travel writing account of a place you have been to or an imagined holiday
destination. Aim to use the same techniques you have identified in Bryson’s writing. Hand
this in to your teacher during your first English lesson. Try to write 300 words.

What if I need further help? Please do not be concerned if you are unable to answer all
questions or have queries you would like answered. If you would like further assistance
during the summer period please email [email protected] stating clearly the subject and
your query. You are also welcome to ask subject teachers for help during the enrolment
process