Welcome to Our Blog Conversations Beyond the Classroom!

Welcome to our Eng 100 Blog “Conversation 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! I 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!

Tuesday, May 17, 2011

Do You Feel Lonely When You Eat White Bread?

The PBS Documentary “The Persuaders” by Rachel Dretzin, Barak Goodman, and Douglas Rushkoff show the unfortunate truth about the advertising industry from the view point of the advertisers. There are groups of people all over the world sitting in a room, right now, and all they are doing is figuring out how to get your attention. They sit and think about how to smear their logo all over your face. “Do you feel lonely when you eat white bread?” This is an actual question that an advertiser asked a consumer to gain insight on how to solicit them better. If you answer yes or no, how does that help anyone?

In every niche and crevice, there is an ad for something that someone is trying to sell you. In the beginning of the program, I saw the word “Clutter” at least 10 times, yet this is their goal. You are supposed to be saturated with slogans, theme songs, and colorful logos at every viewpoint in your waking day.

They said that half of advertising dollars are wasted, but they don’t know which half. I got an idea, how about you just stop advertising, and let people decide for themselves what they want and when they want it.

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