Annotated Bibliography
(major writing assignment #2)
The following lecture answers these questions:
1. What is an annotated bibliography?
2. What is expected from students in creating an annotated bibliography in this class?
What is an annotated bibliography?
Let’s start with something even more basic:
What is a Bibliography?
A bibliography is a list of sources used for a particular writing project. You might know it better as "References" or "Works Cited" depending on the style format used for the piece of writing. The bibliography typically contains only bibliographic information: author, title, publisher, date, pages, and other information important to aiding the reader in finding the source on his or her own.
What is an ANNOTATED bibliography?
An annotated bibliography includes a summary and/or an evaluation of each of the sources. When creating an annotated bibliography, you'll want to include the following things, depending on the specific assignment:
In the next slides, we’ll take each of these in turn.
1. Summary
Many annotations simply summarize the source, and this is the heart of the annotated bibliography. What are the main arguments? What topics and subtopics are covered? How would you explain to someone what the source is about? In great part, the length of your summary will depend on how detailed your summary is, and the level of detail of your summary can be influenced by the length of your source.
2. Assessment
After summarizing, you might want to evaluate it. Is it reliable? What is the bias of the source, or is it completely objective? What is the goal or purpose of the source? How does it compare with the other sources in your bibliography. A
3. Reflection
Summary and assessment are important to determining the nature and value of each source. The next step is to figure out how the source ifts into your research. Is the source helpul to you? What will this source contribute to your project? How does it help you to shape your own argument? How can you use this source in your research project? How has it changes how you think about your subject?
The annotated bibliography is a good tool for a research project because when you have to write annotations for your sources, you are forced to read each source more carefully, reading more critically both in terms of gathering data and assembling your sources with purpose. At the professional level, annotated bibliographies help to create a picture of the work that has been done in that particular field and how you might fit your scholarship within that existing body of work. Working on an annotated bibliography can help you to explore the field, to see what the authorities in that field are arguing about, and to develop your own point of view.
The annotated bibliographies we write will include summary, assessment, and reflection. This doesn't necessarily mean that you need to write an entire essay about each source—brevity is fine, as long as you don't sacrifice good description and evaluation of each source.
FORMAT
Generally, the bibliographic information in an annotated bibliography is written in MLA or APA format. It's up to you to figure out which format you will use. The annotations are written in paragraph form, in complete sentences, of course. The lengths of annotations can be anywhere between a couple of sentences to a couple of pages, depending on the detail of the annotation and the purpose of the document.
For our project, you should be able to write your annotations in about five sentences. Following are examples of Annotated Bibliographies in MLA and APA formats. Click here for the pdf I got from the Academic Index.
What is expected from students in creating an annotated bibliography in this class?
WA2 is
an annotated bibliography of relevant articles from your textbook (Problem Posing) and your own work over the previous weeks.
(see syllabus for exact dates)
The Annotated Bibliography includes at least five annotations:
Let’s dive in!