Conversations Beyond the Classroom (Eng 100O): ad (Jen Humphreys)

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 (Jen Humphreys)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NP3a6ShtJk4&feature=related

Recently I came across a McDonalds commercial that implied many of the aspects that Sholes brought to my attention through his essay “On Reading a Video Text”. Implications of background music and unrealistic scenery were used in the McDonalds commercial. These effects lead to better visual fascination. Many people assume that advertisement ends there, but it doesn’t. The commercial as a whole is demonstrating Ronald McDonald attempt to find a new hairdo. Of the many new hairdos he tries, they all are representing different genres of people. Showing the different personalities in one commercial make it more relatable to people. Of the hairdos shown, some were what I would consider rock star, artistic and beat boxer which are characters that some people aspire to be like. Finally Ronald McDonald achieves the hairdo he was looking for, which was the exact same hairdo he started with. Upon reviling his final hairdo, Ronald announces to his hairstylist Rudy that “this style really is me.” Rudy then replies to Ronald that “everybody loves it” and all the characters in the background break out into a giggle agreeing with Rudy saying “we sure do!” When I was a child I would have found this commercial very appealing due to the clown and other strange looking characters in it. I would not have thought much more about it besides the fact that it was a McDonalds commercial. Now that I have a better understanding about video text and visual fascination, I can see the cultural myth involved in advertisement. Although the commercial is suppose to be selling McDonalds, and there many different products, it seems to stray far away from that. Through the whole commercial I don’t see a single cheeseburger nor any other food products. The commercial is aimed towards kids and accepting themselves for who they are. Parents as well will fall for this advertisement because that is one of the many lessons they teach their children.

1 comment:

JconroySeptember 30, 2010 at 2:32 PM
1. There is alot of cultural assumptions in this video text. The main one being that all the different hairstyle represent types and styles of people. They are associating their product with these people. I agree and find it interesting aswell that they never display their food.
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Practice Introductory Post, Please!

Please Post an Introduction (for practice) by Monday, Sept. 22nd so that we can all be prepared for the first blog post assignment coming up next Thursday.

Here's what to do:

Once you've accepted the invitation to become a contributor to this blog, you will notice a "new post" tab at the top of our blog. Click on that and enter your text. (I suggest you first type in a MW doc and then copy and paste to our blog to minimize the risk of losing your work.) Then, post!

For your first post, please:

Write a brief informal introduction of yourself. Say whatever you’d like about yourself to us—your audience & collaborative learners. Check out Mary’s introduction if you need some ideas about what to say about yourself.