English 102 Assignments

Works Cited Exercise

This week, as an important part of your preparation for your first major paper (and also as a way of beginning the difficult work of making a bibliography for that paper, I’d like you to submit three Work Cited entries for actual sources you intend to use in your paper.

In addition, I’d like you to write a few sentences underneath each entry that describes how that source is going to be helpful to you in your paper. You don’t need to have read the whole thing, but you should have a sense of how it will all fit together. Obviously, you should not copy and paste a summary of any of these articles that you find online, nor should you copy and paste anything from the actual articles. The assignment is asking you to write 3-5 sentences about each article as a way to help you begin to think about the shape of your paper.

Here’s an example in MLA style of how it would look for Carr’s book (but please note you may not use Carr’s book as one of your three citations for this exercise. While that book must appear in your eventual bibliography, I want you to have found three of your four new sources by the end of this week).

Carr, Nicholas. The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains. New York: W.W.

Norton, 2010. 

I’ll be relying heavily on chapter 7, which details Carr’s research on how the internet has changed our brains for the worse. He argues that we are less capable of long periods of concentration, which is a key part of my paper. One idea I am particularly struck by, and think ill play a key role in my paper, is the notion that things we read on the screen are harder for us to contextualize than things we read on the page.

Please remember, each citation must be in correct MLA format That means you’ll need to locate the templates on the OWL, and make sure you them right.

For this exercise, 3 points are for the correctness of your citations, and 2 points are for the detail of your descriptions of those sources.