bibliographic essay

In Week 2, you decided on your topic for your final essay, and you located eight credible sources and presented your evaluation of those sources in a short essay in which you convinced your readers that your sources are indeed credible. In Week 3you will present what your sources have to say in relation to your topic in a short bibliographic essay.  

Start by rereading the information presented by your sources and taking notes following the methods outlined in the lectures on note-taking in Weeks 2 and 3. As you take notes, also work to capture important ideas and words from your sources using the techniques of quoting, paraphrasing, and summarizing as shared in the lecture this week on that subject. For each source, represent the main point the author is making in the article, being sure to use quotation marks for exact words and to note the position of the cited passage by taking down the page or paragraph number which you will use in your in-text citation.  Once you feel that you have a good idea of the information presented by each of your sources, try to organize the information you have gleaned from them in a logical way. You can start by putting all notes with similar points of view in groups together.  Notice what your sources share in common and what makes them different from one another.

At this time, you should be able to create a thesis statement for this short essay that will share with your readers the broad scope of the contents of the articles you have located through your research work. However, at this point, you still will not present your point of view on your topic. The work of this essay is simply to present the information that you have found from the various sources. Your thesis statement might say something like this if you were writing on school voucher programs:  “Research shows divergent opinions on the effectiveness of school voucher programs; and these differences seem to rest on issues of funding, representation of parents on school boards within school districts, and location of the schools in urban, suburban, or rural areas.” Within this example, we can see that the divisions of opinion can be used as categories which suggest a potential organizational strategy for the bibliographic essay that you will submit this week.

As you compose your essay, be conscious about its organization and make sure to represent accurately the main points of information you have gotten from each source. You must present to your readers the information which you will use to inform your research work for the final project, including information from eight sources. Be sure to use accurate in-text citations and to include a references page. You can start with the materials that were corrected in Week 2 and make further refinements to ensure that your references page is perfect according to APA style. Also, be sure to conclude your essay with a paragraph which sums up your bibliographic essay and indicates your readiness to proceed to the next step in the research process.