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

Advertisement Analysis

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ve4M4UsJQo

The video I picked was a commercial about the new Honda Accord Hatchback. In this two minute video clip, they show us a Rube Goldberg machine, the objects being different parts of the Honda. A Rude Goldberg machine is a complex system of objects set up in a cause and effect manner and all these objects are linked to complete one single task. In this commercial as soon as you click play it catches your attention as a series of actions begins to unfold in front of you. Using psychics as the main attraction, we are intrigued and amazed no matter what age or gender you are. It begins with a car bolt rolling down a board and hitting the next, and after this it continues with a series of cause and effect actions that eventually end up moving a Honda down a ramp and triggering a banner reading “Accord” to come down beside it and the narrator saying “Isn’t it nice when things just…work.” This commercial shows us in detail, different functions from the inside and perspectives of the car. The people at Honda give us a false perception and we, the viewer, see no fault in this vehicle as we see this incredibly complex contraption flawlessly continue to perform. The viewer will now believe that the vehicle is just as complex as the Rube Goldberg and that it will always work in the same way while driving, complex but simple at the same time. Robert Scholes stated in his essay “if the system works America works” and at the end of this video the narrator said “Isn’t it nice when things just…work.” In saying that, the commercial by Honda argues that the car was built with such detail and precision that how can this vehicle not work well?

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