I will now discuss those features of the texts themselves that allow for their categorization as nonfictional travel writing. Being a novice traveller and writer, Blessington did not aspire to write her early travel journals strictly in the encyclopaedic tradition established by Joseph Addison's Remarks on the Several Parts of Italy (1705), which recorded solely useful and objective observations of foreign lands and displayed a great scope of knowledge. Nevertheless, in her early journals, she adopted some of the received conventions of his age in order to be admitted to the circle of travel writers. The author of The Idler in France and The Idler in Italy had already been a seasoned traveller and writer. Here Blessington too drew on the practices of the previous age, yet selectively, her goal being predominantly to recount her subjective experience of travel, influenced by her social, national and gender position.

Blessington presented her early travels in the form of a journal – one of the two basic techniques in the eighteenth century, along with letters (Batten 1978, 38). Belonging to the genre of life writing, the travel journal aims at the presentation of ‘an individual's own life, thoughts and experiences’ (Ożarska 2013a, 15). In the eighteenth century, however, travel accounts that were too autobiographical at the cost of factual details would come into criticism (Batten 1978, 39). Even though this attitude had already become passé by the time Blessington published her journals, she nevertheless refrained from revealing too much of herself. At the same time she tried to convince her readers that she was not a ‘fireside’ traveller and that her accounts were credible (ibid., 76).

The organizational pattern adopted in the journals reflects a diaristic mode of recording travel experience. Typically, the presentation of events is chronological and follows the traveller's itinerary, starting with the departure from London and concluding with a happy return home (IoW 1, 84; NtP 1, 171). Moreover, the layout of the journals is clearly organized, as entries are regular, relatively short and in most cases indicated by specific dates, including the day of the week.