Annotated Bibliography

 

Three important administrative notes:

  1. There is no grace period on this assignment--if not turned in by the date noted above, then the assignment will receive no credit, and the student will be asked to withdraw from the class for lack of sufficient progress.
  2. Many of the activities in class over the course of the next few weeks directly relate to the annotated bibliography assignment.  Students should give special care and consideration to these activities.  One of these activities is a grading exercise using the summary article as a sample source.  Students should pay complete and undivided attention to the discussion on that day (probably February 4).
  3. There is a backside to this handout that lists required readings!!

Purpose

The assignment's purpose is to provide an opportunity for source analysis and reflection prior to or simultaneous with the commencement of a draft.  The goal of the assignment is to provide you a formal assignment that forces you to critique and justify your sources, showing you which sources are good, which sources may not be so good (and annotating rejected sources that were seriously considered is great), and where your holes are.  For each source, you will be writing a 50-to-200 word paragraph (the length is dependent on the length of the source) that makes assessments about the source rather than giving summaries from them (summaries will occur in the paper—summaries here earn F’s).

In straightforward terms, any annotation written for my assignment should answer these four questions using the more concrete evaluative criteria described below, in the required readings, and in class modeling and discussion:

You may certainly examine these questions in a negative light—that is, you can justify why a source will not be used; you may also examine why you are not sure a source will be used.  Whatever you do, do not include any sources that you have not examined carefully.

In examining any source, you need to look at the following criteria.  Some will be more relevant than others, depending on your subject, purpose, and thesis:

·         The author's background and qualifications to write on that subject.  Here particularly look at the role of the journalist or reporter vs. that of the scholar vs. that of the magazine article writer.

·         The date the work was published and whether the subject matter involved are affected by that date.  This is particularly important in dealing with social science, science, technology, or medical topics.  Humanities and history topics tend to have less a need for justification along these lines as do primary sources.

·         The type of work that the research material comes from:  type of web site, magazine, journal, etc.

·         The scope of the work and the extent to which it deals your subject matter

·         The amount and, more importantly, the kind of evidence that is cited and the level of analysis and theory in the work vs. fact and reporting

·         The level of the author's language--for whom does the author write and how does this affect your choice?

·         The style the author uses--does the level of intelligence and veracity within match what you need for scholarly purposes?  Are sacrifices made for style over substance? [1]

You also want to consider how you are using the source.  For instance, if you have determined that a source will be used as a primary source, your annotation will be spent justifying its existence in your paper--the veracity of the primary source for your research.  DO NOT include interviews or surveys whose results have not been compiled. 

Required Readings

Annotated bibliographies will be graded assuming that students have visited and reviewed carefully material from the following web sites.  You are responsible for careful consideration of these materials—use of materials beyond these is certainly a good thing, but remember that these are required reading.

Format

Present the 10 items in the order in which you would alphabetize a bibliography containing these.  Present a bibliography entry, then present the annotation.  You can either single or double space this assignment, but provide an extra space between each citation and each entry.  Please use 10-point Courier as your font.

Grading

Each entry is graded using a holistic reading where I do little marking on each entry beyond grammar, leaving my comments until the end.  Each entry is given a score: 9 or 10 is an A entry; 8 is a B; 7 is a C; 6 is a D; and 5 is an F.  Zeroes given for missing entries will cause a one full grade deduction for each entry missed; the deduction will be taken AFTER an overall grade is determined on the other entries (i.e., if you have 9 entries, and I give an overall grade of B, the deduction will drop the grade to C; grades noted on the syllabus as not used are not used on this assignment, and round-up will occur).  Only the first ten entries will be graded--extra entries will not be considered.  I do not sum these points--I look at the proportion of scores as well as the overall style, grammatical competency, and thoroughness used.  Some positive and negative consideration will be given for these three areas separate from the scoring: students should try to vary their approach to the discussions. 

Do not use the same style or format for each entry--remember the audience and be sure to present some variety in your writing.  Remember also that you can have some fun with this--the grammar used should be formal, but the tone can be less formal than the paper in order to let you figure things out as you go along.  I do ask for complete sentences and good spelling.


[1] Information in this section quotes and/or is adapted from Brenda Spatt's Writing from Sources, 4th edition, page 322.