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!

Monday, May 23, 2011

you can buy love and happiness

I have heard my whole life that you can not buy things such as love and happiness. According to today's advertising companies, you can. Advertising companies sell everything from beer to happiness. In the article "On Reading a Video Text" by Robert Scholes, the author examines one particular advertisement from the ninteen eighties. In this advertisement there is a black man with dreams to be a umpire in a major baseball league. He overcomes racial and other problems and becomes an umpire. We don't find out until the end of this advertisement that the ad is for Budweiser beer. The advertisers are not just selling beer the7y are selling a lifestyle. They are tellingyou that if you buy and drink Budweiser, you will accomplish the American Dream. You will be succesful and live a happily ever after fairy tale life. The author talks about the relationship between the American dream and beer when he says, "But surely it sells the American way first and then seeks to sellits brand of beer by establishing a metonymic connection between the product and the nation". By getting the audience emotionaly involved with a product, story, or ad you are able to sell them ther product that you want. Which is what Budweiser accomplishes with this ad. The author goes on to talk about how to critizize a video and how to see beyond the product in an advertisement.
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