Personality Types and Blogging: How Personality May Affect Your Writing

Posted on January 9, 2012 by Reannon Muth

Photo by Ed Yourdon

 

Side-stepping away from travel for a half-a-second, this post is about my second favorite activity:  writing.  I stumbled upon this girl’s blog a while back and found it fascinating.  In it, she outlines the strengths and weaknesses of various personality types as they relate to people’s ability to write.  If you don’t know your Myers-Briggs personality type, you’ll have to take the test first (a shortened version is available online for free).  You can view a complete list of all 16 ‘writer’ personality types on her website, but I’ve included a few interesting ones below.

INFP Writing Personality

From the blog:

“Work best in a quiet environment where they won’t be interrupted. They like autonomy so they can perfect their writing according to their own high standards without having to follow someone else’s schedule.

Prefer writing about personal topics. You may lose your creative drive if the subject isn’t meaningful to you. If so, try taking an angle that allows you to write about your feelings on the topic. If you’re an INFP technical writer, look for ways to connect with readers by anticipating and meeting their needs.”

Famous INFP writers:  Shakespeare, Yeats, Emily Bronte, JRR Tolkein, Amy Tan

ISFP Writing Personality

From the blog:

“ISFP writers are acutely aware of the sensations in their physical world. They are adept at conveying the feelings associated with texture, color, and sound. ISFPs want to connect with their audience on a personal level and can have difficulty writing if unsure of the audience’s expectations. Their focus on others is so strong that they may hesitate to express their own deeply held beliefs. But if they learn to trust their voice, they can communicate their gifts of quiet joy and keen perceptions to their readers.”

Famous ISFP writers:  Eminem

ENFP Writing Personality

From the blog:

“ENFP writers are creative souls with an ear for language. They find abundant inspiration in the world around them. But they can lose steam quickly if the topic is dull, which can lead to procrastination and missed deadlines. If you’re an ENFP, you’ll likely find that talking about the topic with others can help you maintain your interest and discover new approaches. Too much isolation can make writing a chore.

Famous ENFP writers:  Mark Twain, Charles Dickens, Dr. Seuss

 

Categories: Travel Personalities, Uncategorized | Tags: , , | 8 Comments

Travelloged: This Week’s Top Pics and Posts for Travel Addicts

Posted on January 4, 2012 by Reannon Muth
  • The Real Buddha Bar, Tended by Tokyo Monks - Holy cow, this was fascinating.  The one question I had though was this:  Um, aren’t Buddhist monks supposed to condemn alcohol?  Isn’t serving patrons sake shots a little hypocritical?
  • I’ve always wanted a VW van but have never had the money.  One of these days, when I’ve gotten around to paying off all my bills and have some money again, I’m totally buying this:

VW Camper Van Tent. It sleeps four and is modeled after the 1965 Volkeswagon Van.

 

  • I’ve looked all over Google and have yet to find where this is sold (which leads me to believe it’s either not real or not on the market anymore) but I think it’s ingenious.  Supposedly it was made in Japan.

Baby Mop!

  • Overnighting in this treehouse at the Lion Sands Game Reserve in South Africa has just been added to my travel bucketlist.

Tree House "Hotel" at Lion Sands Tree Reserve

The ‘ice hotel’ in Quebec, Canada looks like super cool place to chill-out!  Ha, ha.

I found this clip from the film “Paris, Je T’aime” captured well the mixture of loneliness and elation felt while traveling alone.  In an interview with NPR, the director, Alexander Payne (who also wrote and directed Election and The Descendants) said that he intentionally chose an actress with zero knowledge of French, so that her French accent would sound as garbled as possible.

I played this video for my adult ESL students and was worried that they wouldn’t understand the joke or worse, that some of my Latin American students would find it offensive, but they all laughed and found the award-winning short film to be really clever.  For any ESL teachers out there (or anyone who teaches a current events class) this site provides a well-written lesson plan to go along with the film.

Also, if you’re an ESL teacher and you want to know how to make grammar more interesting, you really ought to check out this dude’s blog.  I’m obsessed.  He has hundreds of lesson plans (which you can copy or paste from the site or download).  Seriously, it’s the best.

 

Categories: Travelloged | Tags: | 1 Comment

How Do You Define ‘Home’ When You Live Out of a Suitcase?

Posted on December 31, 2011 by Reannon Muth

Photo Courtesy of "I Am Not I's" Flickr photostream

Finish this sentence:  Home is…

For me that answer isn’t an easy one.  I was born and raised in Hawaii, finished high school and college in New York and have lived in 10 different cities in five different countries since then.  I currently live in Las Vegas.  While a part of each of those places has felt homey in its own way, I have yet to find a piece of the planet to lie the ‘ol welcome mat down on (at least not permanently).

But according to Sean Bonner’s post “Where is Home?”, that doesn’t matter.  My home is planet Earth.  Period.

Here’s an exert from his blog post:

“There is a whole group of people, Global Nomads, Technomads and Permanent Travelers who don’t live anywhere, but at the same time live everywhere. In the same way that people are drawn to the idea of “home,” I think that the ability to call the whole world home is just as romantic, and equally if not more attractive.”

He also mentioned that he sees this as the ‘natural progression of things’ and that as individual society’s move further into one big global society, everyone will eventually have lives spread across dozens of cities and several time zones.  Living out of a suitcase will be the new normal.

I like that idea.  Instead of feeling lost or inadequate for not having that elusive ‘home sweet home’, we nomadic souls should instead view ourselves as simply being a little ahead of our time.

 

Categories: America, Travel Personalities | Tags: , , | 1 Comment

New Travel-Related Words Added to the
Dictionary in 2011

Posted on December 30, 2011 by Reannon Muth

"Bucket List Word Cloud" by Mccmicb

 

How’s your travel vocabulary?  Have you been keeping up?

Here’s a list of travel-related words that have been officially recognized by the Oxford English and Merriam-Webster dictionaries.

Mankini

Official Dictionary Definition:  a brief one-piece bathing garment for men, with a T-back.

"Mankini" by Littlebitmanky

How it Relates to Travel:  Popularized by the movie Borat, this is one fashion-trend that should have never made the journey from the film world to the real world, but according a Google-image search and the Oxford English Dictionary, the trend has become widespread enough to warrant an official place in our vocabulary.

Couch-surfing

Official Dictionary Definition:  Staying the night at the home of another person, especially a stranger, for free

How it relates to travel:  The best invention in the world of budget travel since the youth hostel, couch surfing was a term first coined by the creators of the couch surfing website and social networking site couchsurfing.com. The website has been around since 2003 and currently has 3 million members in 246 countries.  Clearly couch- surfing is by no means a new word to the lexicon of most season travelers, but as it is with most new dictionary entries, the word needed to have reached a significant level of popularity before it could make the leap from slang to official English word.

Ego-surfing

Official dictionary definition:  The act of search the Internet for instances of one’s own name or links to one’s own website

How it relates to travel:  Travelers used to use photo albums, slide-shows and the stamped pages of their passports to show off their travels, but now, in the social media-rich world we live in today, they use the Internet.   As ‘me-centered’ websites like Facebook, Twitter and Linked-In have grown, so too have the amount of people who regularly google-search their names.  Are you guilty of ‘ego-surfing’?

Boomerang Child

Official dictionary definition:  a young adult who returns to live at his or her family home especially for financial reasons

How it relates to travel:  Many travelers have experienced the shame of having to move back in with the parents after a long stint abroad.  In the past, the status of ‘boomerang child’ was temporary.  Living at home was merely a two-month transitional phase; time enough to repack and apply for jobs before bouncing off to the next ESL teaching job or voluntourism gig.  But as the number of jobs world-wide has decreased, the number of Boomerang Children have increased and the word has taken on a more dismally permanent meaning.

Travel Words Added to the Dictionary in 2010:  staycation (a vacation spent at home), tweetup (a meeting or other gathering organized by means of posts on the social networking service Twitter) and locavore (one who eats food grown locally whenever possible).

And on a related note, in researching for this post, I stumbled upon this:

10 of the Most Misused Words on Travel Blogs

From the post:  “I was taught very early on, that my travel experiences are incredible enough to most people, without staining my writing with outlandish statements.”   (Sidenote:  The blog is called “Trail of Ants” which I think is such a unique name for a travel blog, don’t you?  I love the blog’s layout, too).

Are you guilty of using any of those words on your travel blog?  What travel-related words do you think should be added to the Dictionary in 2012?

Categories: America, Foreign Languages, Fremdsprachen | Tags: , | Leave a comment

Future Travel Plans: Montana or Arizona?

Posted on December 29, 2011 by Reannon Muth

I found a  ticket from Las Vegas to Phoenix, Arizona for just 26 dollars (round-trip!) and another plane ticket from Las Vegas to Bozeman (which I know sounds like the capital of a small eastern African country but it’s actually a city in Montana) for 80 dollars (round-trip).

What I need from you, dear readers, is some advice.  Where should I go?

Something to consider is that my guy friend and I will be:

A. Only able to go for a max of three days and

B.  Visiting in February

Montana

Photo of Bozeman, Montana by Art History Images

 

Youth hostel:  26 dollars per night (Sheesh!  Expensive, no?)

Plane ticket:  80 dollars (RT)

Things to do:  Skiing, Montana Grizzly Encounter, Pioneer Museum, Museum of the Rockies, Hotsprings

Phoenix

"Washington Street, Phoenix, at night" by Gwilmore

Youth hostel:  15 dollars per night

Plane ticket:  26 dollars (round-trip)

Things to do:  Pub crawl, Mystery Castle

Mystery Castle by Media Fury

While researching for quirky things to do in Phoenix, I discovered the “Mystery Castle” which is neither a mystery nor a castle but a 1930′s house made out of salvaged junk and auto parts.  It has 18 rooms and 13 fire places.  Tours are just five dollars.

Well?  Whatch ya think?

Categories: America, Crazy Adventures | Tags: , | Leave a comment