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



Monday, November 15, 2010

The Confident Gaze

In the article by National Geographic’s titled, “The Confident Gaze” by Shekhar Deshpande. Deshpande talks about how a photograph may look amazing and beautiful, but there is also a deep and more than likely dark story behind what lead to that photograph. In the article it’s mainly referring to what India is like compared to what it used to be since it’s “turning 50”. There was a statement that came off to me as somewhat truthful when it comes to many magazine photographs. Shekhar states, “Human suffering becomes worth a good image”. (Par 10) What he means by this quote is the more the countries population is suffering the better it will look in pictures, and even if the situation of the photo may look beautiful, you have no idea what the back story could be behind that photograph. What I mean by this statement is, when you look at a country and see the people suffering it could be for many reasons, one could be from losing a loved one or from losing a home. Photographers will take advantage of these situations so that they can find an interesting photograph that will make their boss’s happy. I believe that some photographers only care about what will make them money and get them fame. There was another part of the article that really caught my eye. It was the quote by Deshpande that stated, “But while it covers or represents such issues or situations, it can sanitize and even beautify the blood and the gore of the conflict”. What I believe Deshpande is saying is, by capturing a photo no matter what is going on in it. Wither it be bloodshed or sadness a photo can turn into beauty no matter what it looks like the people are doing. What I mean by this is, a photographer has almost a direct ability to make a gruesome and horrible situation look radiant. Overall the article opened my eyes to what photographs can really turn out to be, and even if a photo may look appealing it could also have a totally different story behind it.
Posted by at

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)