Saturday, September 12, 2015

QRGs: the Genre

In this post I will discuss and analyze the conventions of a quick reference guide, by answering questions about these conventions. This will help me when I have to create my own QRG.

Auntie P, "Magnifying Glass." 6/1/2005 via Flickr. Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.0 Generic
1. The conventions of a blog post and a quick reference guide appear to be quite similar.  These include:

  • Title
  • Sub-headings
  • Concise paragraphs
  • Images/Visual data
  • Hyperlinks 


2. The title is typically the largest and most prominent text on the page, in order to grab a reader's attention. Sub-headings are also larger than the text within the paragraphs, and are typically presented as questions, which makes them stand out. The actual text of the guide is made up of brief, detailed paragraphs, with a lot of white space in between them. The paragraphs are formatted this way to make the text easy to read and to make sure the reader will not be overwhelmed by the appearance of the content. Images are used throughout the QRGs to provide emotional appeal to the readers, and further prove what the author is proclaiming. Hyperlinks are provided sporadically within the QRGs to allow the reader to find more more info on the given topic, and see evidence for what the author is claiming.

3. The purpose of a QRG seems to inform readers on a topic that they don't know much about. Or if a reader knows some information on the addressed topic, they can quickly navigate the QRG, in order to further his or her knowledge on the subject.

4. The intended audience for any given QRG appeals to individuals who want to learn more about the topics addressed within that guide. Though all of the example QRGs present the information about their topics in a similar, informal and simple, way their audiences can be very different. For instance individuals who are concerned with the debt crisis in Greece, may not care about Gamergate.

5. Authors can use images for many purposes. I think that the main reasons why images are chosen to be sporadically included in QRGs is to get a reader's attention and appeal to his or her emotion. Or on the other hand, images can include statistics and data to illustrate what the author is claiming, in a visual way. The types of images used in a QRG really depends on what the content of the guide it.

Reflection:

In order to analyze and reflect further on QRGs, as a genre, I looked at posts by peers. Posts by Mark, Jessi, and Jenny.

I feel like my peers and I have a really nice grasp on the idea of what a QRG is and what purpose it has. We all had a lot of similar thoughts about the conventions of a QRG, as discussed in class, and how they can be effectively used by a writer. One point that all my classmates and myself acknowledged was the varying audiences of the QRGs, all with a common goal. One aspect of my peers' posts was their execution of concision and bullet points, especially in Jenny's post. I can definitely work on my the brevity of my writing, because I feel like I tend to get wordy. 

3 comments:

  1. I like how you can recognize when to use bullet points and when to use paragraphs for each question. Just for future reference, maybe add more detail into each convention in the first question? (Having images cited, subheadings are usually questions...etc). Still, I think this post was well done and is very well organized!

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  2. I feel that overall, the conventions mentioned here along with those we went over in class universally cover the major aspects of writing a QRG. Overall, it seems that we've managed to establish fairly sweeping working knowledge of what a QRG is, which will help us accommodate reader expectations when writing in the genre.

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  3. Though a bit vague with the bullet points, which could be expounded upon, the rest of this post is effective and covers all points. Solid post. I also like the choice of image, which is a nice simple classy image as opposed to the 'clip art' style that is easy to opt for.

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