Vignettes can be a great way to teach kids about descriptive writing. They provide an opportunity to focus on a single, vivid detail, while still providing an overall impression of the entire story.
Whether you’re working on a fiction or nonfiction book, essay, film, or play, vignettes are a great way to describe a particular moment in a larger work. They’re typically short, well-crafted, and finite in detail.
When you’re ready to create your first vignette, you should decide on its style. Perhaps you’d like to write a freestyle vignette, or use the format of a letter or blog post. Or you might decide to choose a specific topic, such as “Spring,” and then write about that.
If you’re going to write a vignette for school, it’s important to select an appropriate topic. You don’t want to write a vignette about a topic that you’re not comfortable talking about, or that might be offensive or inappropriate.
It’s also important to be sure that your vignette is a good fit for the target audience. It’s easy to write a vignette about something that is completely irrelevant or doesn’t interest you, but you’ll need to make sure that it makes sense for the people who will be reading it.
The best vignettes tend to be short, focused, and centered around a specific problem or goal. They’re a better fit for showing how a particular feature works and solving a specific problem than help topics or function documentation are.
This might be a particularly valuable exercise if you’re teaching a class on design or user experience. Your students will appreciate the chance to see a specific task or workflow in a more visual way.
Creating a vignette is easy in word 2010. To do so, open a new document and select the R Markdown template from the rmarkdown package. Change the title, author, and other metadata, and then you’re ready to start writing!
1. Vignette files are UTF-8 encoded.
When you’re ready to build your vignette, it’s best to start by building the package locally and then submitting the built file via CRAN with devtools::submit_cran() or devtools::release(). You should then wait a little while before using the vignette to make sure that all of its dependencies are properly installed and that it hasn’t broken anything else in your local environment.
2. The vignette is HTML and PDF-compatible.
As long as the vignette is encoded in UTF-8, it can be saved in either HTML or PDF formats and will be recognized by R. You can even include the output with an image, as long as you place it in the same location as the vignette.
3. Use knitr to evaluate chunks in the vignette.
You can use the eval option in an early, hidden chunk to set the default for the rest of the vignette to a particular value, or you can override it with a separate chunk. However, in the latter case, you’ll need to use knitr::opts_chunk$set(eval = FALSE) in the corresponding code chunk to prevent R from automatically evaluating that chunk.