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



Sunday, November 14, 2010

Summary: Deshpande

In this article of National Geographic, Deshpande discusses photographs and how they affect our lives. More spefically, how photographs can influence our lives. Westerners like to think that they are perfect, non prejudice people. In reality, everyone judges another culture just by what they have heard. You see something different and you immediatlely judge it, whether you mean to or not. By looking at photos however, you see the beauty in something that isn’t so beautiful and you don’t feel as bad. As Deshpande says, “issues [or] situations… [but at the same time] sanitize and even beautify the blood and the gore of the conflict” that the country is experiencing” (par. 12). We like to think that everything is fine when really it isn’t. We like to think that everything is beautiful when really it isn’t. Again, a quote from the article says, “human suffering becomes worth a good image” (para.10). When something looks beautiful, we forget about the harsh realities behind the image because it is easier to take something at face value than actually make a connection and realize how serious a situation is.
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