QRGs: The Genre

For this blog post I read 5 different Quick Reference Guides and am going to come up with a kind of a definition of the genre based on common conventions, formatting, purposes, intended audience, and use of imagery throughout the 5 pieces. I will specifically be answering these questions:

1. What do the conventions of this genre - the Quick Reference Guide - seem to be? 
2. How are those conventions defined by the author’s formatting and design choices?
3. What does the purpose of these QRGs seem to be?
4. Who is the intended audience for these different QRGs? Are they all intended for similar audiences? Or different? How & why?
5. How do the QRGs use imagery or visuals? Why do you think they use them in this way?

Commonalities: 

I noticed a few key commonalities between all 5 articles: They all read easily: the style is very conversational, casual and personal. 

Structurally they are divided up into small easily manageable sections. These sections have question-style headings that both anticipate and shape reader's thought processes. There is lots of white space on the page to break up blocks of text.

They also all use hyperlinking liberally to provide further information for the reader may without having to use time and words explaining every aspect of the controversy. 

Imagery is used to bring an emotional charge to many of the pieces. They give faces to the people involved in the controversy and connect the reader more deeply with the issue. They also provide a pleasing visual break from the text and make the articles even more readable. 

The reason for these conventions is because the audience is the general public, and the articles are intended to give readers a comprehensive understanding of a specific controversy and all the players, motives, and tactics involved. The audience is primarily non-academic, so why make them hard to understand? They should be as easy to read as possible.

PublicDomainPictures. "Baby" 9/10/2015 via Pixabay. CC0 Public Domain License

Reflection: I read Hunter's, Aaron's, and Matthias's  posts on QRG genre. They all said basically the same things, probably partly because we did this activity in class and all drew on that to write our posts. All 3 of them were quite thorough and I had a hard time finding things that they missed. I feel like everyone has a pretty good sense of the genre at this point in the process.