Saturday, July 18, 2015

QRGs: The Genre

Quick Reference Guides were the lifeblood of my freshman year. The ability to find useful information about a topic I wasn't familiar with and quickly have a decent understanding of it was invaluable. But I never really thought about what it takes to make a quick reference guide..
Sharon Pruitt. "Student Sleeping Creative Commons". 5-3-11 via Flickr. CC A 2.0.


It seems like all of the QRGs have either images that detail the subject and provide a good visual representation of the most basic information, or short blurbs that have all of the vital information. The stem cell QRG is a good example of one that utilizes images to make its point, whereas the rest of the QRGs provided to more with blurbs to make their case. Most of the formatting is conducive to this because it allows you to simply scroll through the page one time and get everything you need out of it. This is easy to do either with images or with the blurbs. It seems like the purpose of the QRGs is to give readers a basic understand of the subject so that they can recognize it and maybe even hold conversations about it with other people. They don't have to know everything but they will know something. From what I can tell, the intended audience is anyone who is interested in learning more about that particular subject. QRGs don't require any prior knowledge and they don't do into too much detail.
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3 comments:

  1. UnknownJuly 19, 2015 at 10:39 AM

    I agree with your blog post, each QRG in their own ways have images that inform readers about the subject they are talking about. The importance of QRGs is to give readers a basic understanding of the information which could interest a reader into finding more information about the topic. Good response!

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  2. Sayanna MJuly 20, 2015 at 8:08 PM

    I think you did a good job in describing what the main purpose of QRGs are: to inform the audience in a concise manner on complex topics. All the vital information is there and the visuals help to put those complex topics into perspective. Like you mentioned, not every single detail will be included but you will gain a good level of understanding in a short period of time. Great job!

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  3. BottaiJuly 21, 2015 at 1:29 PM

    The work here is not really detailed or explicit about answering the questions from the prompt. Check out a classmate's example of very well-developed, visually organized work: http://sayannadm.blogspot.com/2015/07/qrgs-genre.html

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