English
Dungan
Annotated Bibliography
Due: __________
This assignment is designed to fulfill these goals:
1. To (re)familiarize you with annotated bibliographies, and their purposes
2. To help you conceptualize the scope and format of your final project/paper
3. To collect and annotate all of your sources before you begin to write your final research paper
An annotated bibliography is a compendium of sources that build on each other for the purpose of supporting a larger work. To this effect, you will be creating an annotated bibliography of sources that will be used in your final research paper.
Ultimately, you will need to deliver an annotated bibliography of no fewer than ten sources. They must be credible and scholarly sources (with the exception of the latter two, which may be any sort of source, provided you use it mindfully and rhetorically). This is how you begin to build your skills as a researcher – by analyzing the value and work of others, and using it to synthesize a new argument. It is possible that you will need to include something like a YouTube video, a photograph, or some other primary source for evaluation. While I don’t mind one or two of these, be mindful of how difficult it will be to write a proper annotation, and don’t treat them as a cop-out.
Click around http://www.comppile.org/wpa/bibliographies/index.php for examples of what a professional annotated bibliography looks like. Pay attention to how it is formatted, and the level of analysis required for a citation to be of any value. (In other words, I don’t need to know if the source was “good” or not – but how was the research designed? What is their primary claim? What methods did they use? Who else did the author cite? What were their results? Will you be using the source as a counter-argument? To support one of your own assertions? Be aware that professional annotated bibliographies often inter-reference themselves, wherein you’ll see something like “X’s argument is in direct contrast to author Y, by stating that….”)
Rubric –
No fewer than 10 sources
Organized by alphabetical order
The majority of the sources are sufficiently credible – scholarly by nature and peer-reviewed. No more than two sources that would fall in an “other” category.
Each source is properly cited in the style appropriate to your discipline (including italics and proper indentation)
Each source has a sufficient annotation:
· A sentence explaining the thesis
· no less than three sentences providing a summary of the source itself (question under investigation, research methods used, conclusion)
· and no less than three sentences wherein you explain how you plan to use this source in your final paper. In this section, say: 1. What this source does that is UNIQUE from the others on your list and 2. How you plan to group it with other sources/apply it to your question