Written Words

For the texts in the tourist brochure, their suggestions could be categorized into three aspects: the written contents, the choice of words, and the writing style. The written contents include the things that should be removed, corrected or added. As for the choice of words, we mainly focused on the title of the brochure. Lastly, for the

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writing style, we would present a good strategy of using “you” in the essay and other unattractive writing styles.

First, some interviewees suggested that we should remove or shorten some information in the brochure. As Ip (2008) pointed out that the purpose of brochures was to promote tours as a whole, not just a particular attraction among them, we tried to balance our introduction of destination and wrote equal length of content for each tourist spot. However, interviewees suggested that we arrange the contents in an organized way or take away some contents. For instance, the content of Mysterious Digital Tour Guide for Taipei Botanical Garden should be shortened because some interviewees didn’t think the introduction had an influence on the trip (Image A9).

Besides, as most of the interviewees who visited Beimen station didn’t have interest in photography and thus didn’t know what they could do in Photographic Supply District, they suggested removing this spot (Image A17).

Secondly, some wrong information in the text was identified by the interviewees.

The wrong information included incorrect names of the store and typos in the brochure. For example, the information we mistakenly provided was the restaurant’s name of Idiot Noodles, which we introduced in Xiaonanmen station (Image A7).

Participants who went to Xiaonanmen station corrected us that it’s Fool’s Noodles.

Besides, interviewees also corrected one typo found in our brochure. That is, the title Mysterious Digital Tour Guide was mistakenly typed as “Myterious” Digital Tour Guide (Image A9).

Next, according to the interviewees, several things should be added to the

brochure which meant we lacked some important details in the tourist brochure. First, for all the three MRT stations, we failed to provide some helpful bilingual information in the tourist brochure. For example, we introduced some Chinese culture about the homophonic of Chinese character in The Imperial Delegate Station (Image A6). We

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mentioned that “The deer (鹿) is a homophone of money (祿), and the official hat can be seen as a metaphor for job promotion.” Nevertheless, we should write lù for their pinyin beside the Chinese characters (鹿 and 祿) to enhance their understanding of the metaphorical meaning of the homophones. What’s more, we should also provide bilingual menus for tourists to order food with ease. We in total introduced three restaurants—Fool’s Noodles for Xiaonanmen station, Bus Eggs Cake House as well as Ji He Xi Xiaolongbao for Wende station. Many interviewees mentioned that we should provide the estimated price and suggested bilingual menus while introducing restaurants. They hoped they could know both Chinese and English information so that they could easily order the meal, as suggested by an interviewee, “maybe not provide all the menu, only the recommended ones because tourists usually like to experience not only the buildings but also the culinary.” Other interviewees also suggested that we provide the bilingual names of sauce bottles for them to easily identify and to add in the noodles since we specifically mentioned in the brochure for Idiot’s Noodles (Image A7).

Some crucial details should have also been mentioned in other tourist spots. For instance, we introduced Xia-Hai City God Temple and the romantic story derived from it (Image A22~A23). However, we failed to mention where and how tourists can get God money and incense sticks, so they got confused if they wanted to experience the local religious tradition. Besides, one interviewee also suggested adding some information on when the best time is to go to a certain destination. For example, the Taipei Botanical Garden is famous for its lotus in summer, but it may be a little dull for tourists to visit there in winter. An interviewee said that “You can provide the information about what time you can see flowers or what kind of flower you can see in every season because when I got there, flowers were almost dead.” Thus, we should not only provide the opening hours but also add “suggested time to visit” as

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extra information. Additionally, interviewees advised us to put some introduction on the first page of the brochure and to add some description of what the brochure is for as well as some tips and advice while traveling in Taipei. They also recommended us to add several interesting facts or cultural knowledge in our brochure. Among the above, it seems that introducing culture may attract the participants more. For instance, a participant who went to Wende station suggested we introduce the temples and said that “In Asia, there are some special cultures, like red color means luck, which could be introduced.” They thought the architecture of temples was beautiful and

recommended us to put it in the brochure. This feedback corresponded to Pearce and Lee (2015) in that the motivations behind a tourist’s need to engage in tourist

activities are to discover unknown places and new cultural features.

In terms of the choice of words in the brochure, several interviewees specifically had some opinions toward the title of the brochure. Most of them got confused about the title—Three Secret MRT Stations. They considered the title attractive but felt difficult to understand if the secret was about the MRT stations or about the places around the stations. One of the interviewees wrote in the brochure that “In the title you mentioned about MRT, but you didn’t provide a lot of information about it.”

Another interviewee said that “We expect that for each MRT station there should be some introduction; however, only few explanation is provided.” For instance, in the brochure, there was a brief introduction for the Wende station and MRT Brown line (Image A28). Some interviewees liked the introduction and hoped the other two MRT stations could also have similar sections, but others said that “the introduction of MRT station is not necessary.” Also, one participant visiting Wende station wrote “no need if the other two don’t have” in the brochure, suggesting that we should balance the contents of every MRT station. It seems that readers would pay attention to the title as well as the consistency of the contents being introduced for each MRT station. Thus,

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the title of the brochure should be clearer. Some interviewees suggested using a more specific title, such as “Taipei Secret Beauty” or “Taipei’s Hidden Secrets.”

As for the writing style in the brochure, most of the interviewees had positive feedback to our usage of addressing readers as “you” in the brochure and said that

“it’s friendly and good.” As indicated by Francesconi (2011) and Dann (1996), this choice was aimed to make readers feel unique and to establish a conversational and friendly tone. An interviewee also said that “it’s like how you would talk with a friend.” However, there were other disagreeable writing styles that didn’t catch their attention. For instance, we used a different writing style and added some informative questions such as “When life is suffocating, what do you do?” for introducing Bihu Park in Wende station (Image A30). We also added a puzzle for bringing out “Dan Bing (蛋餅),” a Taiwanese breakfast dish (Image A28). Nevertheless, interviewees regarded this style as unattractive and odd. They suggested removing those questions and replacing the puzzle with a list of recommended menu. It turned out that we should carefully consider the consistency of our writing style.