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

Sunday, February 27, 2011

Quick summary of the documentry Pursuaded

In this documentary written by Barak Goodman & Douglas Rushkoff directed by Goodman & Rachel Dretzin and produced By Goodman, Dretzin & Muriel Soenens, Correspondent Douglas Rushkoff shows us several different views on ways Advertising has become a multibillion dollar industry who’s research teams specialize specifically in techniques to part the consumer with their money not only by appealing to their wants and needs but by tapping into the collective subconscious of the public at large. He also gives examples of how this technique has spilled over into the political arena and politicians are tapping into information gathering companies like Acxiom to acquire information used to manipulate voters on a more personal level. As put by Frank Luntz “ political and corporate adviser”  “80% of a person’s life is emotion and 20% is intellect, better to know how a person feels than how they think. According to people like Paul Woolmington (CEO, the media kitchen) they want to create a movement for their product almost on a cult like level. This documentary gives many examples on how the advertisers ,which also seems to be what politicians are today, are targeting specific people but more so it describes where they get these ideas and incites that lead them into what they believe is the realm of the subconscious mind of the people. 

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