i need help doing the ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY and the research

ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY

An annotated bibliography is a bibliography with notes on each entry. Your bibliography should follow the MLA style format. You can find examples of this format in your textbook from English 1010/1020, the MLA Style Handbook or various web pages, such as The Owl at Purdue Writing Lab: http://owl.english.purdue.edu/owl/resource/557/01/ . You can also use www.easybib.com to create your entries.

Your bibliography should have 3-5 sources, and they should be a mix of primary and secondary sources. You should put them in alphabetical order by author’s last name; if your sources don’t have authors, use the source’s title to alphabetize it. You cannot count the text you have chosen as a source. Instead your title should let me know that this is an annotated bibliography for William Wordsworth’s Prelude or Sherman Alexie’s “Class.”

You should state your research question before your bibliographic entries.

Primary sources are sources written by the author (memoirs, letters, other literary texts), written by the author’s contemporaries (a biography or review that appeared during the author’s lifetime or shortly after his/her death, written by someone who was alive during the author’s lifetime) or related material from the author’s lifetime (newspaper articles, essays, pamphlets, etc.).

Secondary sources are sources written about the author, usually after his/her death by someone who was not alive during the author’s lifetime (a biography, a critical study or scholarly research article). It’s also more general studies about the author’s time period, again written after the author’s death (a general history of nineteenth-century England, for example, or a book about Native American oral tradition).

A good place to look for sources is your textbook. These have bibliographies so you can use them to hunt down other sources. Furthermore, use the TSU library. Use the catalog for books and hard copies of literary journals and newspapers, and use the literary databases to find more specific information about your text.

After finding your sources, creating their “Works Cited” entries in MLA style, and reading them, you then need to write the annotation. This follows the entry and it is about 1-2 double-spaced paragraphs. In the entry, you summarize the main thesis and supporting ideas of each text, and you evaluate its usefulness to you, an undergraduate student in literature.

Here’s a sample of an annotated bibliography entry:

McCabe, Michael E. “The Consequences of Puritan Depravity and Distrust

as Historical Context for Hawthorne's ‘Young Goodman Brown.’” American Research and

Analysis Website. Florida Gulf Coast University. 7 July 1998. January 22, 2008. http://itech.fgcu.edu/faculty/wohlpart/alra/Hawthorne.htm#INSERT%201

McCabe bases his analysis of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s short story “Young Goodman Brown” on Puritan theology, which emphasizes man’s inherent depravity, the importance of the conversion experience to indicate one’s own salvation, and the crisis of faith that occurred in second and third generation New England puritans. He also claims that the story parallels the early nineteenth-century anxiety about religion and religious revivals that swept New England. According to McCabe, Puritan theology put its followers in a double-bind: they were inherently sinful, and only signs of God’s grace working within them indicated that they were one of the saved. But there was also mistrust about what counted as a conversion experience and people were encouraged to distrust their instincts and thoughts. So Puritanism actually led to an atmosphere of mistrust—of one’s self and of others—that led to a cycle of misery and gloom.

I liked this essay because it put the story in the context of both seventeenth-century New England and Hawthorne’s own lifetime. It made me think more seriously about the corrosive effect of Puritan doctrine on the main character and his community in the story. I think McCabe does a good job of using other primary sources to support his argument.

After your last bibliographic entry, you should write your tentative thesis (the possible answer to your research question, and what you will argue for in your research essay).