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



Wednesday, September 29, 2010

Ad Analysis



    The commercial I chose is one of a mouse and his slightly unbelievable journey. It starts out with the mouse emerging from a hole in the wall and walking over to a mouse trap with cheese. The mouse nibbles on the cheese, then the screen goes black and the audience hears the snap of the trap. The screen goes back to the mouse that is now lying under the cross bar; the mouse is still breathing, holding on for his life. All of sudden the mouse starts bench pressing the bar in which he is trapped underneath. And then a shot of the product: Nolan’s Cheddar Cheese, with the slogan: seriously strong. With each “segment” of the commercial the background music changes from Top of The World by The Carpenters to The End by The Doors to Eye of The Tiger by Survivor. The songs alone set the mood of each part of the commercial.
    I say that the commercial represents the Chinese proverb “When you fall into a pit, you either die or get out.” This because the mouse decided that instead of just lying in the trap and dying, he used the predicament he was in to benefit himself. I think the underdog story of the mouse not giving up has a lot of inspiration in it. The product of course is the cheese that put the mouse in the trap and is that if the person who is trying to get rid of the mouse had put in any other type of cheese then the mouse would have perished, but instead they used the “seriously strong” cheddar cheese that gave the mouse the strength to prevail. To me the music would be the aspect that catches my attention if I were to see this commercial on TV then the cute little mouse and the motivating underdog story would have got me to watch till the end where I would be compelled to buy the cheddar cheese that is being advertised. 

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