How To Make Your Journal Prompts Talk to Each Other- What Is a Field Protocol
Most travel journal prompts arrive as a list: thirty questions, no particular order, pick whichever looks least frightening. This works about as well as you’d expect. The auther (hello, it’s me) proposes an alternative, the field protocol, in which prompts are planned in advance and arranged to follow the shape of a trip. Early entries collect raw material. Later entries return to it. In my own field trials, I’ve come home with a story rather than a stack of loose observations, and occasionally with a better memory of where the good bakery was.
Definitions (or what I mean by “protocol”)
In a lab, a protocol is the agredd set of steps you follow so that your results mean something. In fieldwork, it’s the plan you make before you arrive, because you will not be thinking clearly once you do. I learned that in my anthropology degree, and relearned it every time I’ve stood in an arrivals hall with no idea what I’d meant to write down.
A field protocol for a travel journal borrows both ideas. It’s a sequence of prompts, one per day, written and organized before the trip and arranged so that each one does a specific job. Some prompts gather. Some prompts compare. Some prompts deliberately reach back and ask you to reread something you wrote a week ago. The order is the point.
A list of prompts asks what should I write today? A protocol has already answered that question, so you can spend the energy on actually noticing things.
A Short and Slightly Alarming History
The idea of handing travellers a prepared list of questions is older than modern anthropology. In 1874, a committee of the British Association for the Advancement of Science published Notes and Queries on Anthropology, for the Use of Travellers and Residents in Uncivilized Lands. It was, essentially, a field protocol for the British Empire: a long questionnaire on language, religion, social life and material culture, meant to standardise what amateur observers wrote down. It went through six editions, the last being published in 1951.
When I first met the publication as an anthropology student, it was as a cautionary tale, and it is a fine example of what not to do. The questions were built to sort and classify other people from a distance, and the title alone tells you a great deal about who was doing the looking. Later anthropologists, starting with Bronislaw Malinowski and his students, argued that real understanding came from staying put, participating, and writing things down while they are still happening.
So the field protocol I’ve written keeps the useful half of the 1874 idea (prepared questions, so the observer isn’t improvising) and throws out the rest. The prompts point mostly at you: what you noticed, what surprised you, what you assumed and got wrong. CLifford Geertz called the goal “thick description”: not just recording that someone winked, but what the wink meant, to whom, and why it mattered. You can’t write thick description about a place without also writing honestly about the person doing the describing.
Why Connected Prompts Work Better Than a Random List
They build on each other. Educational psychologists have a word for this: scaffolding, a term David Wood, Jerome Bruner and Gail Ross introduced in 1976 for support that’s structured just ahead of what a learner can do alone, then gradually removed. A field protocol does this with attention. Day 2 asks you to record a sound you can’t identify and make a guess about it. By day 11, you’re using that same guess-then-check method on something you’re nervous about. You’ve practised the move on something low-stakes first.
They follow the trip’s real shape. Trips have an arc. The first days are all senses and confusion. On my first trip abroad, Paris at fourteen, I mostly remember one aquarium ticket window, handled in nervous French while my mom and grandma watched. The middle is when routines form and you start comparing here to home. The end is when you realize you’re about to forget things. A protocol puts the right prompt in the right week, so you’re not asked to reflect on the whole journey on your second afternoon.
They give you something to return to. A midpoint review only works if there’s an arrival entry to review. A letter home is richer if you collected a local word earlier to put in it. Linked prompts turn your journal into a conversation with your earlier self, which is, if you think about it, what a letter to somewhere is.
They beat the forgetting curve. In 1885, Hermann Ebbinghaus showed that we lose much of what we learn within the first day or so. Fieldworkers have known this practically forever, which is why ethnographers are told to write up their notes the same day. A protocol makes same-day writing easier because the question is already waiting.
Methods: How to Run Your Own Field Protocol
Read the whole protocol before you leave. Knowing that Day 8 will ask “what did you expect versus what you found” changes how you pay attention on Days 1 to 7. This is legal. It’s encouraged.
Write at the end of the day, not just the end of the trip. Ten minutes is plenty. In bed, on a train, at a café while someone else finishes their coffee.
Keep a scrap of evidence. Ticket stubs, receipts and napkins are primary sources. Tape them in. Future you will be grateful and slightly confused about why the napkin mattered.
Missed a day? Don’t double up. Skip it, or answer it the next morning. The links between prompts should survive the gap. They don’t survive guilt.
Adjust to your trip length. On a week-long trip, do two prompts a day and keep the arrival, midpoint and departure prompts in place. On a month away, stretch one prompt over two days of experience, write more, and use the off days for free writing too.
Reread before the big ones. Before the midpoint review and departure entry, flip back through what you’ve written. That rereading is where the story starts to show up.
Bring your companion in. One prompt asks for another person’s version of the same moment. It’s the closest most of us will come to an ethnographer comparing informants, and it’s usually funnier.
Findings
Travellers who follow a protocol tend to report three things, me included: they write more consistenly, because the hardest part (deciding what to write) is already done; they notice more, because they know what they’re looking for, and they come home with a journal that reads like a story, with a beginning, a middle, and an end, rather than a list of meals. My own next round of fieldwork starts in November, in Buenos Aired, with a printed copy of the protocol in my bag.
Conclusion: Your Copy of the Protocol
I’ve written a field protocol for you. The Fourteen-Day Field Protocol is fourteen linked prompts for any two weeks away, from an arrival report written for a committee that has never left the house to a departure entry about what you’ll forget first. It prints on US Letter or A4, it can also be used digitally in GoodNotes and Notion, and it’s free when you sign up for the Slow Travel Society Newsletter, my once-a-month letter from wherever I am.
Join the Slow Travel Society and get the Field Protocol ➡️
And if you’d rather keep your end-of-day entries on your phone and easy to access, the Letters To Somewhere app was built for exactly that. Ten minutes before sleep: write the entry, add your favourite photos, and pin the place on the map.
Findings inconclusive. Continue study.
Warmly, Courtney
