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

Deshpande Summary and Quotes

In Shekhar Deshpande’s article, The Confident Gaze, he tells his readers how National Geographic uses photography to lure oneself in; piquing curiosity to open the cover and read. A startling photo on the front of the magazine intrigues people to want to read more and gather knowledge on who, what, when, where and how. One of Deshpande’s claims is “human suffering becomes worth a good image” (para.10). The “power to transform” as Deshpande states, is used to clean up bad images and make them more “lookable” to the people reading. It belittles the actual dead reality of that horrific event or happening in that place. In some ways, Deshpande hints that National Geographic takes one thing and disguises the truth so that Western audiences are more comfortable with viewing that specific picture. Deshpande goes through many different claims that lead up to one big complex claim which is at the end. It states: “One feels great for having encountered one’s faint and fuzzy prejudices in palatable language and one feels good because we know that the country has done a lot of catching up in 50 years, but it has a lot of catching up to do if “catching up” has to mean something” (para. 20). Deshpande focuses on how National Geographic photographers “play with” or “edit” their pictures to make them seem not so bad. Photography is posed; in some ways photography makes death become a piece of art instead of a report of tragedy.
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