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

Zach's Analysis: Farmers Insurance Ad

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1_UqaS89rng

In the video I chose, there were 3 men in an airplane in the opening scene. Two of these men seemed to be working together, and they didn’t seem friendly. One of the men pushed the third man out of the airplane door, and he begins to fall to his death. Until 2 men fly into the screen and give the falling man a parachute. He lands safely and walks away. The narrative I got from this commercial was “America as a brute force,” if we don’t get it our way we use our strength.

As a whole Scholes’s essay is urging us to look deeper into what we are watching, and critically analyze what we are taking in. I see a man being pushed out of an airplane, but for what reason? Are the men pushing him the “bad” people, or is he? Our mind generates these questions to build a background to this story. The background I came up with from this commercial was that the man being pushed out of the airplane had dome something to make the other men mad. The way the men got rid of the opposer was to throw him out of an airplane. The way our minds want to generate a background relates back to the “power and pleasure” we enjoy, it keeps us interested.

There were was one thing I saw in this ad that I could relate back to Scholes’s main point. He states that “Another 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 informed ethical decisions” I believe that in this video we are portraying violence because of the men pushing the other man out of the airplane window. This can be a subliminal message to kids that violence is an okay thing. Even though this message is not stating it in words that we can see or hear, children may reenact a tv show. I am sure non of us want this to happen to any children. So why even put it in commercials for them to pick up?

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