Annotated Bibliography

Smith 1

John Smith

Prof. G

1 January 2000

Sample Annotated Bibliography

Sagan, Carl. The Demon-Haunted World. New York : Ballantine Books, 1996. Print.

In this book, Carl Sagan systematically defines pseudoscience, delves into its causes, and

attempts to offer his predictions for what could happen if we aren’t skeptical of pseudoscience

and pseudoscientists. The chapter “The Dragon in My Garage” is of particular interest because

Sagan provides an extended allegory meant to illustrate the ad ignorantiam fallacy.

Sagan is particularly talented at taking complex ideas and making them accessible to a

lay audience. He frequently employs anecdotes to draw the reader into the text, and at times he

leans quite heavily on pathos. However, he doesn’t ignore appeals to ethos or logos. For

instance, he provides a number of statistics and data to help demonstrate the lack of scientific

education in the United States.

For the most part I agree with Sagan. I found the Dragon allegory particularly powerful

because it perfectly illustrates how easily it is to be fooled by the ad ignorantiam fallacy. Sagan

claims that “if there’s no way to disprove my contention, no conceivable experiment that would

count against it,” then the contention literally means nothing (171). I do think that Sagan should

have addressed the media’s culpability a little bit more. He addressed it at times, but I think the

media, and advertising in particular, is much more responsible for our current state of scientific

illiteracy than Sagan identifies.

Comment [M1]: Correctly formatted MLA works cited entry.

Comment [M2]: The first section of your annotated bibliography should be a summary. When writing the summary, make judicious use of

summary, paraphrase, and quotations.

Comment [M3]: The second section of your bibliography should be a rhetorical evaluation of the work. When writing the evaluation, make judicious

use of summary, paraphrase, and quotations.

Comment [M4]: The last section of your annotated bibliography should be how the work

impacted you. Did you agree with the author?

Disagree? Support you position. When writing your reaction to the argument, make judicious use of

summary, paraphrase, and quotations.