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Paula I Arraiza

An Underrated Type of Tourist

Type of Progym: Refutation

Even though Urry makes some great points in his piece about what he calls the “tourist gaze”, I couldn’t help but find myself disagreeing with some of his arguments. He seems to have a cynical and almost negative opinion about traveling just to see the sights a place has to offer. One of his main points is that

“there has to be something distinctive to be gazed upon, that the signs collected by tourists have to be visually extraordinary.”

Personally, I disagree with this claim. There’s something calming and refreshing about experiences sights that are familiar when traveling. While many tourists do go traveling for “visually extraordinary” sights, I think many tourists enjoy the simple views some places have to offer. However, they tend to be overlooked because the majority do travel with that “tourist gaze” Utter talks about. Yes, sightseeing is extremely fun, but not everywhere we go will offer an out of this world experience, and I think that’s fine. As we’ve already learned, many people go on trips to find themselves. If you travel with the goal of learning more about yourself and looking inward, sightseeing wouldn’t be something you’d be preoccupied with. For many people, traveling is about being able to escape a certain place, no matter where the destination is. For those who travel for themselves and not with sightseeing at the forefront, whether a place is astonishing or not is not important. The extremely overused phrase “it’s about the journey, not about the destination” would be the perfect way to describe this. For many, it’s not about looking at the best views or monuments, it’s about looking at parts of themselves they wouldn’t discover if they wouldn’t have traveled. Urry seems to forget about this type of travelers when speaking about tourists, which does a disservice to them in general since it portrays them all in a bad light.

2 replies on “An Underrated Type of Tourist”

Paula, Bravo! This is a thoughtful refutation. To improve, notice that this progym suggests that you need to “give a summary of the story.” You do indeed begin to do this, but I think you’ll find that, paradoxically, the more you give voice to the opposing view, the more ethos you gain, and the stronger your own refutation becomes. So, in short, I’d suggest, whenever refuting an argument, to really linger on it. Really go all the way making their case. Think about it: there’s no more powerful rhetorical move than to say, “I know exactly what you think and why you think it, but here’s why you’re wrong.” This is the kind of move that goes a long way for lawyers in court rooms!

I don’t want to be that tourist who always uses a translator and experiences difficulties even in the simplest situations such as conversations in shops, hotels and transport. To do this, I decided to study on my own and learn English with the help of Promova. It’s convenient that I go through a topic here, study the material, and then I can use parts of speech online test to commit everything to my memory. I hope this will really be effective

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