WELCOME

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!


--Mary Hammerbeck, Instructor of Eng 100

Tuesday, January 25, 2011

Quotation Sandwich

Quotation Sandwich using a peer quote
by: Annie Goodale

I think this whole issue of reading online and making writers change how they write is important because we are living in a society today that revolves around technology.
Fellow classmate and student at Whatcom Community College, Dean Macy writes, "Life is moving fast, information even faster. We need to get to the point and move on."(Dean Macy)
In other words, what I think Macy is saying that we need to keep things short and simple, because nowadays we don't have the time to spend in a lengthy article.
Our society is fast paced and they want information now. We don't want to wait til we've reached the end of a twenty page article just to find the information or the answer we are looking for, especially when we could find the same answer in a shorter amount of time. The information we gain today might be void tomorrow. So if information is constantly changing can we learn anything?

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