QRGs: The Genre

ClkerFreeVectorImages. "Lightbulb Electric Light Bright Idea Tungsten." 9/2012 via pixabay. CC0 Public Domain. 

In this post, I will be discussing the parts that make up a quick reference guide. Each of these parts comes together to make sure the reader can understand and learn from the context in the most efficient manner.

1. What do the conventions of this genre seem to be?

• After close examination of the examples of quick reference guides, it seems that there is a template they generally seem to follow. First, all of the examples seem to have a descriptive title, informing the reader of exactly what the article is going to be about. These are going to be the key words you search in Google if you are confused about a particular topic. 

For example, the title "The Only Guide to Gamergate you will Ever Need to Read" tells you exactly what the author will talk about. 

• Once the idea of the guide has been introduced, now the author writes an introductory paragraph(s). Not only does the author exaggerate the idea of the title, but they go on to give more information about the ideas they will zoning in on in their paper. They will also introduce the audience to their side of the argument within the topic. 

For example, in the E-cigarette guide, the introductory paragraphs tell the reader that, according to the research they accumulated, e-cigarettes are considered better than smoking actual cigarettes, but still contain harmful side effects. In this case, the author words her analysis in a way that she does not really support the use of e-cigarettes, but they beat the alternative of smoking real tobacco. 

• Within the articles, there are always pictures with citation and oftentimes descriptions below them. These images create sympathy with the audience to better get the author's point across. They give a different perspective to the facts that might not have been apparent at first. 

This idea becomes apparent in the article about the Greek debt crisis. They could have picked from a number of pictures involving numbers or money, the central idea of the problem, but instead the author chose an image of a sad, young girl on her father's shoulders. It makes people think about the struggles people are encountering instead of purely the economics.

• Now getting into the meat of the guide, it seems that many of the guides used general questions to present their information. They are the more general, essential questions pertaining to a topic that gives the audience the topic they are looking for. These are the sort of questions a college student might search for on Google. They are general and allow the audience to quickly scroll through the guide and find the parts they need to understand the most. They also keep the reader engaged by changing subtopics in a distinctive way.  

This was done in all of the articles mentioned above for the title, picture, and introductory paragraphs. These questions are also there so when someone does search the key words on Google, for example, this article would appear giving them a direct answer to the question. 

• Also, within the body paragraphs, the QRGs should contain some sort of graph or visual aid to help portray the point the article is making. These statistics should bring the factual evidence to back up the claim the author is making. Research had to have been done in order to make the conclusions the author made, so this just merely states to the public that they author had validation for making the claims they did. 

You can see this visual aid representation in the e-cigarette guide. Many of the more number the oriented guided information, such as research group numbers, use pie charts, bar graphs, etc. This guide shows a bar graph of e-cigarettes used by high school and middle school students vs. the usage of actual cigarettes. 

• And of course, with all images and sources, hyperlinking is a must. This applies for all information gained by other sources, or images taken from other places on the internet.

    2.    How are those conventions defined by the author's formatting and design choices?

Each author has a slightly different way of organizing their information. These discrepancies may come from the differences in topics. For example, a guide based on scientific research into the effects of e-cigarettes may have different image focuses than a guide talking about an online gaming community.

This was apparent in the differences in visual descriptions. In the e-cigarette guide the author used a bar graph to show that e-cigarettes may be getting younger individuals into smoking rather than having its use be for weaning current smokers off nicotine. Then you have the article pertaining to the online gaming community and how they believe that gaming is a culture in and of itself and should not be attempted to be changed. Instead of using data, they took the words directly from the people, the ones actually being affected by the events. In this case, instead of putting bar graphs etc., they put images of twitter posts. 

Different topics involve different kinds of sources, which can change the format a bit. Another example of a format change is extra information added on the sides. Once again for a more scientific based topic, putting in chronological order the points made by studies and research makes the history and current situation of the topic more understandable for the reader that had little to no prior knowledge of the topic coming into the article. 

Authors are allowed to use their different creative styles to modify the guidelines, since after all, they are just guidelines, not strict regulations. 

    3.    What does the purpose of the QRG's seem to be?

It seems their main objective is to inform. They are generally pretty good about stating both sides to the event or idea. They answer general questions about the topic in an understandable way. They are not meant for people who are seeking really specific knowledge about a smaller part of the overall idea being discussed in the article. The audience seems to be people that have little knowledge coming in to the reading and end up needing to look for the general idea of certain aspects of the topic. 

The questions/statements that begin each section allow the reader to easily find which part of the topic they need to understand and get the essential facts on it. These question introductions allow people to search internet search engines for specific questions. It seems the authors try to include key words in their questions, so it is easy to find and easy to read. 

    4.     Who is the intended audience for these different QRG's? Are they all intended for similar or different audiences? How and why?

These guides seem to be aiming towards the same general people. But the more specific a topic might get, the more the audience usually knows prior to reading the article. Usually the articles start with an engaging title that might either appeal to the sort of person that is generally interested about the topic, or needs to know information about it for, maybe an assignment or a blog post. 

The topics that seem to interest a wider range of people, the olympic opening ceremony, seem to have simpler, easier to understand ideas that either incorporate more humor like information making it a bit more enjoyable for the reader to get engaged with the text. 

With articles about more factual information such as the economic crisis in Greece, factual information becomes more dominant and the objective becomes more of getting the point across in an understandable way rather than a particularly enjoyable way. 

   5.    How do QRG's use imagery or visuals? Why do you think they use them in that way?

This is the idea that I was discussing in #1 about how every author uses visuals within their piece to further connect the audience with the story or help them better understand it. Words end up meaning more when there is a strong visual backing them up. Also, numbers can have a bigger effect on the audience when compared with other numbers. For example, just to show how high the unemployment rate was in Greece, the author compared that unemployment rate with unemployment rates in Spain, France, Germany, Italy, Portugal, and other European nations. It makes the number look much more horrifying. 

These visuals humanize the words, making them either more understandable or making the viewer more sympathetic towards the views in the article. 

Reflection:

Thanks to Michael's blog post on the issue, I greatly understand how this kind of literature is used primarily for obtaining important facts for a certain issue. Also, so that the reader can obtain sites to cite for sources for their own research projects. The QRG gives the reader the main points of an issue so that the audience does not have to search through a million sources in order to get the general idea of the topic. The audience gets the main argument in the controversy without doing any of the analysis.
Andrea's blog post made me realize the importance of using factual visual representations of the data for the audience to better understand either side of the argument and the reality of the situation that you are talking about in the QRG. For example, in my QRG, the scatter plot makes the reality that people needing transplants greatly outweigh the number of donors that much more obvious and how important it is to increase the awareness of the issue to begin with, but how far should it be taken? The system is there for a reason and provides order and logical thinking to a very emotional issue.

Isaak's blog showed me how I can work on narrowing down the number of words I use and really getting to the central ideas. I tend to be a bit wordy and this is something I constantly need to monitor. There can be so much to say that sometimes I forget that sometimes two ideas that I point out can mean the same thing and do not have to be repeated or emphasized. Also that it is not a typical essay that involves "fluffy" writing. Sometimes getting straight to the point is the best option.