Welcome!

Welcome to our Eng 100 Blog “Conversations Beyond the Classroom”! The title of this blog refers to the community of active readers & collaborative learners we are creating by sharing our academic writing for Eng 100 with each other + a larger group of students, instructors, academics, and just about anybody who chooses to follow our blog! When you write and post your reader responses here (and, later, as you write your essays for the course), I encourage you to use this audience to conceptualize who you are writing for and, most important, how to communicate your ideas so that this group of academic readers and writers can easily follow your line of thinking. Think about it this way: What do you need to explain and articulate in order for the other bloggers to understand your response to the essays we’ve read in class? What does your audience need to know about those essays and the authors who wrote them? And how can you show your readers, in writing, which ideas you add to these “conversations” that take place in the texts we study?

As students of Eng 100, you will use this blog to begin conversations with other academic writers on campus (students and instructors alike). We become active readers of each other’s writing when we comment on posts here. And, best of all, we are using this space to share ideas! We encourage you to use this blog to further think through the topics and writing strategies you will be introduced to this quarter. As always, be sure to give credit to those people whose ideas you borrow for your own thinking and writing (you should do this in the blog by commenting on their post, but you will also be required to cite what you borrow from your peers/instructors if and when it winds up in your essays. More details on that later…).

Finally, keep in mind that writing to and for this audience is a good way to prepare for the panel of readers (faculty at WCC) who will be reading and assessing your writing portfolio at the end of the quarter. We hope that as a large group of active readers, we can better prepare each other for this experience. But, in the meantime, let’s have fun with it! I am really excited see how far we can take this together!

--Mary Hammerbeck, Instructor of Eng 100



Thursday, September 30, 2010

Ad Analysis: State Farm Insurance

Scholes claims that in his essay, that " another is the way the seemingly harmless stories embedded in commercials teach a view of America that can distort important truths, often hiding history and other information we need to make to make informed ethical decisions." I believe that what he is saying here is that we pay more attention to the subliminal messages in the videos' then we do to the actual truth behind it. The essay also goes to on to say that "Scholes urges us to not to surrender to the pleasure, but instead to think critically about images and stories and how they compare to the reality of life in the United States." I agree with Scholes but in reality we all know that we surrender to the pleasure of the misleading messages that we are drawn to the commercials because of the “complex dynamic power." I am relating Scholes work to the State Farm Insurance Commercials. I chose State Farm because to me their commercials can be misleading. Everyone knows the State Farm jingle “Like a good neighbor state farm is there" and their commercials,, but what i believe others don't know is that their commercials are misleading and pulling us in by showing us things that can’t happen. Such as, in one commercial they had a hot tub just magically appear out of nowhere when that jingle was said and in another commercial the perfect guy for the girls just magically appeared. As people watch the commercials over and over again, they start to believe that it may happen in a way. I believe that State Farm thinks that, if they get a catchy jingle and throw in some misleading messages that they will get more customers. State Farm is simply persuading people that they can do just about anything even though most things aren't possible. But us as humans we just want to believe it. Scholes has an interesting quote that he writes in his essay " What Americans really lack, for the most part, is anyway of analyzing and criticizing the power of a text like the Budweiser commercial." I thought that, that quote went perfect with this analysis because in class we are doing the one thing that Americans lack, which is analyzing and criticizing these essays and commercials.

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