Yijia Lyu

Translating an original academic analysis article into an infographic follows the traditional

convention of infographic while presenting the logic of the article, which is the most

important element of a detective novel to the audience, and becomes more fitting into the

wider audience in the contemporary context, especially for people who are not into detective

fiction and Agatha Christie's book and under the circumstance that people nowadays don't

have much time reading a 16-page long article patiently, by re-organizing the arguments and

supporting evidence and providing a summary of the books' content. Therefore, makes it an

effective translation of the article.

“Genre is a type of language that behaves in typical or characteristic ways, which we can

observe in repeated or persistent situations.” (Bickmore, 2020) Genre is basically every form

of writing that we have every day, like emails, podcasts, news, etc. It is what the writer uses

to write his ideas under a specific form of writing following the convention. Therefore, genre

is a specific type of writing the writer chooses to protrude his intention of communicating the

content to the audience. The genre convention of infographic that I am translating into is it

gives the argument and the evidence straightforwardly and the reader can easily grasp the

information either from the images or the words. My inspiration originated from layout of

Cornell notes and a memo because displaying all the arguments and evidence

correspondingly fits the theme of logic and present the logical connection to the readers

instantly, which I soon discovered to be unclassical examples of writing genres and didn’t fit

the requirements. However, searching through new genre gave me an opportunity in finding
an infographic with good sleeping cycles. The images and the argument on it helped me to

understand the point and how they came to this research conclusion. It suddenly became clear

that translating into infographic was the best choice that I had. Besides, the writer of my

article was talking about a very logic-based novel: a detective novel and the whole article

deals with cause-and-effect as its crucial rhetorical element, as she was trying to list the

reasons and evidence she had for making any arguments. For example, from the start of the

article, she made an argument that by holding back books like Curtain and Sleeping Murders

after her death, Agatha Christie made a great profit in both her reputation as a novel writer

and revenue. Then, the writer swifts back and forth about her economic situation, her

relatives’ quotes on Christie’s health situation, and her emotions for the character she created.

So, it can be very intimidating and frustrating for a reader to analyze the connection between

relatively long paragraphs. Hence, by listing out all the arguments and evidence respectively

in my infographic, the reader can better understand the logic of the original text and the

connection between each paragraph. Apart from that, translating the original article into an

infographic is also a representation of “threshold” in essence because it reshaped our

understanding of the article, “transformed our way of understanding, and brought in light the

knowledge that is otherwise inaccessible for us” (Meyer & Land, 2012) At this point, the

translation into infographic opens a new perspective for the reader to comprehend the logical

connection and brought into daylight the cause-and-effect relationships in the article, which is

neglectable otherwise. Thus, it constitutes a “threshold”.

In addition, it can be extremely tiring and difficult for a reader who is not a fan of Christie’s
books or the genre of detective fiction, in general, to read a 4-page-long content just on the

argument about “how Agatha Christie made profits by delaying the publication of her books”.

Hence, providing a summary of the theme, rhetorical elements, arguments and evidence, and

conclusions into an abstract form of translation while still being able to logically connect all

the contents became my epiphany. Translating into an infographic certainly helps me to

achieve this purpose by laying out all the contents in a concise and tidy way. The audience of

my infographic is getting a straightforward format of topic, arguments, evidence, and

conclusion and being able to grasp their knowledge from the infographic right away.

Moreover, a nice hook as an intro can help to grasp the audience’s attention to the subject and

wonder how Agatha Christie could make one crime so fascinating. Having the arguments and

their supporting evidence in parallel with each other also contributes to getting the audience

to identify the logical flow of the article. As an example, one of the arguments that the writer

of my original article made is “Even though there are criticisms toward the change, the last

novels still put a great closure to all of Christie's book series” (Knepper, 2005), and the

supporting evidences the writer gave were Agatha Christie’s last few books in comparison to

her previous books regarding themes, motifs, and plots. She puts a great amount of ink into

discussing how the story progresses in her last and previous books, which is irrelevant to the

core of this comparison: themes, motifs, and plots. Thus, giving only the summary of the

content of the book makes the infographic more focused and more organized in sticking to

the topic. Another reason for writing the information in a way like short messages is because

people today read most of the information from a text message on their cellphone. Since the

audience can be people like teenagers and juveniles, writing the lines as short as possible and
separating the information into various blocks may help them to absorb the content of the

article. Plus, few people have the patience to read a full detective novel these days, so writing

the information about detective novels in pieces and displaying them in infographics becomes

the best strategy in respect of audience and context.

In conclusion, translating the original text into an infographic is outstandingly effective

because it presents the logical connection more obviously in comparison to the original

article while maintaining the convention of infographic and appealing to a wider audience

and broader contemporary context under which people have few detective fiction

backgrounds and limited amount of time to read large paragraphs of contents.

Bibliography
Knepper, M. S. (2005). The curtain falls: Agatha Christie's last novels. Clues: A Journal of

Detection, 23(4), 69–84.

Meyer, J., & Land, R. (2012). Overcoming barriers to student understanding: Threshold

concepts and troublesome knowledge. Routledge.

Bickmore, L. (2020). Genre in the wild: Understanding genre within rhetorical (eco)systems.