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

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wYDNcxu6L30

In this video text it shows two soccer teams of kids playing for the world cup in their dream stadium. The large crowds of loyal fans are roaring for their team. Kickoff starts and so does the game. Calls are made and cards are pulled out and finally, Number 10 makes the memorable goal, making a game they will never forget. It ends with a quick switch from the stadium to the local soccer field where the kids are playing. Slowly it zooms out on a Sony Television and its high quality standard. Immediately, this scene caught my attention with its visual fascination, or as Robert Scholes would say, a professor who studied reading, writing, and contemporary literary studies, it is just one of the matrices of power and pleasure that are organized to relieve us from boredom. And it is often said that commercials are just for entertainment and to influence the audience to buy or use the product.

At the same time that I trust this theory is true, I also believe that in commercials, such as this one and others I have recently observed, I can tell there are hidden messages or myths. In Scholes piece of writing, On Reading a Video Text, it explained the deeper meaning of a Budweiser commercial and its connection between the product and the nation. After I analyzed this video text I concluded that it was trying to connect a world-wide sport with a world-wide TV, such as the Sony Internet TV. It showed children playing their dream game and the text wrote “Imagine reliving the greatest games” on the TV. This, I believe, connects a pastime of soccer and memories with being able to “relive” them by watching them on this TV which gives us the false impression that the Sony TV is better and everything will look better because of it.

2 comments:

  1. The commercial was hoping we would surrender to music. It also implies that the computer will make us feel like we are in the game when the only way to truly feel like we are in the game is to actually be in the game.

    The music was full of inspiration and emotion that caught our attention and held it. Along with making is forget that we were watching a commercial.

    Wes Rosales
    Mariah Beard

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  2. 10.) The music throughout this ad, mixed with the cheering crowd, makes the audience feel very emotional. Also, it helps them believe the commercial want to buy the product.

    9.) The ad consists of soccer and children for a television. The sport at the time was most likely aired during the World Cup. Children hit a soft spot for most people so when they placed children in this commercial, it automatically sucked the audience in. They were probably wondering why there were so many kids on a soccer field.

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