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

Monday, February 28, 2011

RE: "The Persuaders"

In the movie, “The Persuaders” is explaining the progression of advertising, that there is nowhere to go without it. We are in this world of clutter and its becoming our own atmosphere. We can’t even watch our beloved TV shows without seeing some form of advertising in the show. The owners of these companies are trying to engage and connect to the community, trying to draw them in and have them hooked. The companies are coming up with these commercials that aren’t even showing what their product is or what it does. But that kind of brainwashing is making the everyday average Joe want the product even if they don’t know what it is. They aren’t trying to bring in one specific group of people but rather than a whole nation of people. They are becoming part of the tribe, cult of the brands that they buy. Once the American person found a product they love, their most likely going to stick with it. Becoming that regular buyer. The product they are producing the love mark, creating loyalty beyond reasoning. By having this love mark, the companies are able to keep a hold of their consumers, and have them keep coming back for more and more.

We never seem to look into the hidden messages when we buy things. When one person buys an item, it’s usually out of impulse. They like the item that they see and they must have it. Usually it also doesn’t help when someone is on the TV saying, “and hurry up we only have 5 left!” The commenter of the movies explains that, “…persuaders listen to us when others won’t…marketer’s find a way inside us that we don’t even realize it at all…that maybe we are the persuaders.” We must induce the person to persuade themselves.

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