The safari industry sells emotion, atmosphere and the promise of transformation, so why is it writing like a PowerPoint deck? It's driving me mad because something has gone wrong with the way we write, not suddenly (genuinely damaging things rarely happen that way) but gradually and so incrementally that by the time you notice the damage, it's already structural. 

By Sharon Gilbert-Rivett

Open almost any safari lodge website, any tour operator newsletter, any destination marketing blog published in the last three years and you'll find the same thing: short sentences, punchy fragments, line breaks where paragraphs used to be, and ideas that arrive, gesture vaguely at meaning and disappear before they've done any real work. It reads like a telegram sent by someone in a hurry and sells like one, too.

There's a particular tic that's become so prevalent in marketing content that I've started thinking of it as a syndrome. It goes like this: short sentence for impact. Another one. Then a third, just to really land the point. Each one sits on its own line, breathes on its own and hits harder, the writer presumably believes, for its isolation. The thing is, it doesn't... What it actually does is fragment thought into pieces too small to carry meaning, train the reader's eye to skim rather than read, and produce the peculiar sensation of being communicated at rather than with. It's the prose equivalent of someone repeatedly jabbing you in the shoulder to make sure you're paying attention. After the third jab, you stop listening entirely.

I've been writing for 45 years and have written for The Sunday Times, Africa Geographic, the Mail & Guardian, Travel Africa and publications and digital platforms across three continents. I've interviewed guides whose knowledge took three decades to accumulate and owners who gave up everything to build something extraordinary in the wilderness. I've covered pioneering conservation stories and have conducted critical, investigative processes that took years of research before a word was written. I've got a couple of awards gathering dust on my office shelves. In all of that time, I have never once thought: this story would be better if I broke it into shorter pieces and removed all the connective tissue.

What a paragraph is actually for

A paragraph is a journey that establishes where you are, develops where you're going and resolves, or deliberately leaves unresolved, where you've arrived. It carries the reader forward on the logic of its own momentum, and when it's working properly the reader doesn't notice the paragraph at all. They just find themselves further into the piece than they expected to be, and are grateful for it. The architecture of good prose is function, with precision and structure creating a clarity that fragmentation utterly destroys. A well-constructed sentence that does several things simultaneously is not harder to read than three short ones that each do one thing badly. It's considerably easier, because the relationships between ideas are built into the syntax rather than left for the reader to infer.

This approach is not nostalgia for long-windedness. Brevity is a genuine virtue, especially when you're trying to get a point across, but there's a world of difference between a sentence that's short because it's precise and a sentence that's short because no one thought hard enough to make it longer in the right way.

The AI problem hiding in plain sight

A November 2025 survey found that 75% of content professionals said AI had increased the volume they produce. The important word in that sentence is "volume" because that's the metric, not quality, not resonance and certainly not the ability to make a prospective guest stop scrolling and actually feel something. 

The content flood this has produced is, in the most literal sense, drowning the industry. High levels of detectable AI content, limited fact-checking and shifting quality standards are creating new trust and visibility risks across marketing more broadly, and the travel industry, which runs on trust and emotional resonance more than almost any other sector, is particularly exposed.

The short sentence epidemic and the AI content explosion are not unrelated phenomena. AI-generated prose defaults to fragmentation because fragmentation is easy to produce, easy to scan and easy to mistake for clarity. It produces the appearance of communication without the substance of it, and because it's everywhere now, on every website, in every newsletter, across every social feed, it's become the wallpaper against which genuinely good writing stands out with startling force. Which is, if you choose to look at it this way, an opportunity worth seizing.

Writing that sells versus writing that merely informs

Safari is an emotional decision of considerable magnitude, expensive, often once in a lifetime, laden with expectation and the particular vulnerability of someone who has dreamed about something for years and is finally considering whether to make it real. 

That decision is not made on bullet points, and it's certainly not made on fragmented copy that tells someone a lodge has exceptional guiding, world-class cuisine and unforgettable sunsets. It's made when a piece of writing reaches through the screen and puts the reader on a canvas chair at the edge of the Luangwa valley at dusk, with the smell of woodsmoke and the sound of hippos in the river below and makes them feel that magic before they've even thought about making an enquiry.

That's what prose is for and that's what prose can do that no algorithm, no content volume strategy and no short sentence approach will ever replicate. Writing that sells doesn't merely inform, it transports. It does emotional work that the reader doesn't consciously register but absolutely feels, in the quality of attention it demands, the images it builds and the specific, irreplaceable details that tell you this writer was actually there and actually paid attention.

Holding the line

I'm aware that what I'm describing sounds, in 2026, almost quaintly countercultural. The algorithms reward brevity, the platforms reward skimmability, the content agencies reward volume. Yet engagement metrics tell a different story, with users who do reach travel content proving less likely to leave immediately, which suggests that readers who find genuinely good writing recognise it, stay for it and return for it. The race to the bottom is not inevitable. It's a choice made by individuals, agencies and brands who've decided that the algorithm's preferences matter more than the reader's experience. Some of us have decided otherwise.

At The Safari Collective, the tagline is "content with conscience," and that conscience extends to language itself, to the belief that the people we write for deserve prose that respects their intelligence, their imagination and their capacity to be moved by something authentic. It means treating writing as the craft it is rather than the commodity it's increasingly mistaken for. Africa's finest safari properties have extraordinary stories and they deserve to be told in sentences that go somewhere.

Sharon Gilbert-Rivett is founder and Head Honcho of The Safari Collective.