Writing a manual on how to be a drag queen has proven to be more difficult than I have imagined. The process of determining what order and how to place the directions has proven to be more thought provoking than I thought. Before discussing the manual, lets make sure we know what a drag queen is. A drag queen is a male homosexual who dresses as a woman especially for comic or theatrical effect. So it is more than just a cross dresser or transvestites as some will call it. The first draft of our manual contained four different section of how to be a drag queen. The first section was the application of makeup. The second was how to style and put on your hair. The third section was to put on your drag queen outfit and the last was the act of performing. For our test of our manual, we used a normal straight guy who had volunteered. We decided to use a straight guy because he would have no idea how to do anything that our test manual would ask. It would be a fair test on our manual and show us where we needed to improve in our directions. After this experience, we knew exactly where to improve our directions in our manual. From the start, our straight guy had trouble with the manual. In the first section of applying the makeup, he did not know the difference between the different items. We had many items on our materials list so it took him awhile to work himself through it. He had difficulties trying to determine the primer from the foundation in the makeup section. Also, he had a hard time in determining the between the lip liner and eyeliner. When applying the makeup, we did not specify in our manual that our make up had to be even though out the face so he did not do so. He also did not follow through the directions of applying the makeup very well. When applying the foundation that required him to cover his eyebrows, he did not do so. He did not cover his eyebrows and instead had uneven patches of foundation throughout his face. Later on, he realized that he was required to cover his eyebrows so he went back and repeated a previous step. He had a challenging time when it came time to apply the lip liner and creating his new eyebrows. He was not able to create even eyebrows and kept correcting them which meant he had to apply more foundation. Furthermore, when he finally created his new eyebrows, he realized that he used lip liner instead of the eyeliner he was meant to use. He had become so frustrated by now that we had to give him a break to clam down. After, we continued and he had very few mess ups with the rest of the make up sections. He applied his eye shadow and did his lips. He had somewhat of a problem following the directions in applying the fake eyelashes but that was our fault because we had skipped a step in the manual. Besides that he made it though the make up section of our manual.
The next section was the styling your hair and putting on your hair. It was a fairly easy section for our straight guy but he did get confused with our directions. Our participant had miss read one of our direction in which we asked that if you had long hair to pin it back. We have forgotten to specify if you had long hair to follow this step so the participant placed bobby pins in his hair even though he had short hair. From there, he continued with our directions and completed them without any issue. The next section of dressing up like a drag queen was also completed pretty easily. Originally, we had in our directions how to tuck the man’s“member” but we decided that it was too inappropriate and had it taken off from the manual. The participant was able to put on the dress without an issue. The heels did give the participant issues but that was because they were not his size. The last section was the performance section. In our manual, we had simple direction of how to perform a song of the participant’s selection. After our test use, we decided that it is better to take this section out of the manual. We felt that this could vary between each person that uses our manual. Also, we do not have a certain song to perform in the manual so this makes it an issue in the direction of movements to give. So it is best that we end our manual after the dressing up in drag section. After going though the whole manual, we know the changes that we need to make in our test manual. The most changes will come in the makeup section of our manual. The material list need to be given a better description for each item like that there is less confusion. We need to specify that the make up needs to be evenly spread through the face. It should not be patchy but smooth on the face. In addition, we need to give more specify directions in how to do the eyebrows. Also, the eye shadow part is going to be tweaked a bit because I feel we can improve this section. The other sections need to be tweaked here and there. The performance section is going to be deleted from the manual but we might make a reference to it in another section. I believe we need to be more forward with our directions and rearrange some of the words. Plus, some of the order of our directions will be changed. Its will be easier for the participant to follow if we changed some of the directions. Overall, we have an idea of what to change in our manual. Hopefully, we can now clearly express how to become a drag queen.
