Edinburgh Castle to Loch Ness: Writing and Editing Fodor’s Essential Scotland

We love Scotland. Whether its the country’s storied castles, craggy peaks, sublime seafood, iconic golf courses or peat-kissed whisky, there really is something for everyone. It is a small country with an enormous amount to offer.

So when World Words was asked by Fodor’s to help update their Essential Scotland guidebook, we leapt at the opportunity. We know Scotland exceptionally well, with many writers either current or ex-residents, so we knew we had the destination knowledge to do Scotland justice. We were asked to update three chapters: ‘Edinburgh and the Lothians’, ‘Inverness and Around the Great Glen’, and ‘The Northern Highlands and the Western Isles’.

The job involved travelling the length and breadth of each region, seeing every previously-listed tourist attraction, restaurant, bar and shop, and uncovering incredible new places to recommend. It was a gargantuan task. But after many months on the road and at the computer, our work was complete. The guidebook was published this spring.

We have included snippets from the chapters we updated below, so scroll down for a taste of Essential Scotland…

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The Best of Our Spring Travel Content

Look outside. The days are getting longer. Daffodils are poking their yellow heads up through the dirt. Cadbury Creme Eggs have come and gone from our lives. And all this can only mean one thing: spring is finally upon us.

We are celebrating the new season with some of our best spring-themed content. Bid farewell to winter’s hearty comfort food and choose lighter fare instead, with our selection of the world’s finest seafood restaurants. Spring is also the season for festivals, with Songkran (aka Thai New Year) a springtime favourite – you can find a chic place to stay with our run-down of Thailand’s greatest luxury design hotels. With the weather getting better, why not also discover some new places – we’ve added a guide on Moscow and copy for a hotel on the Algarve. And the days may be getting longer, but there’s still pitch black night skies to enjoy, so we have included a piece on stargazing.

Scroll down to read extracts from all of these travel pieces, with links to the full content…

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More of Our Top Autumn Travel Content

Autumn has well and truly arrived: there’s a nip in the air, a peppering of russet on the trees and decorative gourd displays every which way we look. It’s one of our favourite times of year, so we’re sharing some more of our best autumnal travel content (just in case you missed it, here’s our previous selection of fabulous fall-themed content).

First up, we pulled out an article we wrote on an increasingly popular phenomenon: light festivals. This blog post was originally penned back in March, but we felt it was a timely inclusion, as one of the highlights of the light art calendar, Prague’s Signal Festival, gets underway this October. And speaking of autumn festivals, we’ve also dug up our write-ups of London’s Totally Thames and Merge festivals, which take place this September and October.

And because autumn also coincides with wine harvest season in much of the Northern Hemisphere, you’ll find a feature we wrote back in 2014 on the ultimate Napa Valley weekend. Last but not least, for those planning some last-minute autumn trips, we have included a recent travel guide to Ireland we wrote for Oliver’s Travels. We think the Irish landscapes are arguably at their most beautiful when hues of gold, orange and red invade all that green.

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How to Write Travel Copy That Sells

Over the last four years or so, we have written an awful lot on this blog about crafting engaging, insightful and well-written travel content. We’ve offered tips on coming up with attention-grabbing headlines, writing gripping introductions and delivering impactful endings. We have examined the role of narrative in travel writing, we’ve looked at how words and images work in tandem and we have analysed the work of the travel writing greats.

Now, after all that, we felt it was about time we turn our focus to a different beast altogether: sales copy.

While travel blogs and articles often seek to inform and entertain potential customers, sales copy aims for one specific thing: to persuade them to buy a product or service. Consequently, it requires writers to take a different approach. We’ve come up with some tips to help you master the art of crafting sales copy for the travel sphere.

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