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

despande summary


The article “the Confident Gaze” by Shekhar Desphande,  he talks about National Geographic and their photography.  In the beginning of Desphande’s essay, he shows a picture of the front cover of a National Geographic magazine. The photograph shows a close up of a Indian child’s face. The child is painted red all over. The title states that this picture is used for “India turning fifty” Desphande claims, “it does not pretend to evade such situation. But while it covers or represents such issues or situation, it can sanitize an even beautify the blood and the gore of the conflict.” (par. 12). This states that although the pictures show real life struggles and conflicts, used for the readers information, the photograph can be so amazing to the point to where the reader is so amazed about the photograph that the reader forgets the meaning of the picture. Desphande also states that “it is as if that world  needs to be posed in the appropriate way to the Western observer” (par. 13). This also states that the picutures used in National Geographics about other places in the world other than the “westerns” (America), should look a certiant way. It should be looked as if America is better than the other places photographed. In conclusion of Despande’s article, We use National Geographic  to imform us about what is going on around the world, but the pictures tend to be giving us false information.

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