Countries & cultures
Does your research include places and people abroad? Be an armchair travel researcher with advice from Tarja Moles
Writing about a foreign country or setting your fictional story within a different culture can be fascinating, but your writing can easily become fraught with errors if you haven’t done your research thoroughly. Therefore, before you set your pen to paper, or fingers on the keyboard, make sure you have a solid understanding of your chosen location and its culture.
Basic facts
The quickest way to find up-to-date basic facts about different countries and cultures is to use the internet. Wikipedia (www.wikipedia.org) tends to be the first port of call for many, but its information may not always be fully accurate. So, if you decide to use it, double-check your facts with the help of other sources.
There are numerous websites that provide basic data. An example is the World Factbook which is maintained by the US Central Intelligence Agency (https://writ.rs/worldfactbook). It contains quick facts and brief introductions to 267 world entities, covering, among other things, each country’s history, government, people and culture, geography, economy and transportation. To access the information, select the country you’re interested in from the dropdown menu on the top right corner of the page.