Your third major assignment (due 3/29) is an annotated bibliography; individuals will contribute at least 10 annotations for scholarly secondary sources.
The beauty and horror of Faulkner is that there is so damned much scholarship about his work. You could complete the phrase "Faulkner and _______" with just about anything related to literary study, enter it into a database search engine, and retrieve enough hits to keep you busy for a month. For this assignment, which will feed into other writing projects you'll complete this semester, I'd like you to choose a topic area or formulate a research question that you're interested in and prepare an annotated bibliography that addresses it.
An annotated bibliography is a very specific genre of academic research writing that combines the traditional list of sources with concise paragraphs called annotations: short, densely-packed summative and evaluative statements about each source. Annotated bibliographies are not collections of loosely-related information; instead, they attempt to address a specific research question or topic in order to learn about a topic and formulate a claim about it. Scholars often create these for themselves as an early phase of their research projects; sometimes these are even prepared formally and published. A good annotated bibliography demonstrates your research knowledge of the subject and plays a role in your assessment of the scholarly conversation on a particular topic as you prepare to write about it yourself. Trying to write a good annotation forces you to read arguments more carefully and critically, will help you see connections among separate works, and will help you gauge the importance, strengths, and weaknesses of existing work on a topic.
As you will see in examples, an annotated bibliography consists of a series of entries, each corresponding to a single work you have selected for inclusion. In short bibliographies like the one you will prepare, entries are arranged alphabetically by the last names of the authors, just like a normal Works Cited. Long annotated bibliographies (25+ entries) are frequently classified by relevant subtopic first.
Each entry consists of two parts:
- A full bibliographic citation
- A paragraph that describes the work's content and (if possible) evaluates the work's significance
There are two basic rhetorical moves in an annotation:
- Descriptive: Briefly summarize the main argument or point of the source. What is the main argument? What important topics are covered? If someone asked what this source is about, what would you say? Rather than incorporating quotations, this genre relies heavily on summary and paraphrase.
- Evaluative: Make a judgment of the worth of that source. Possible questions to answer: Is it a useful source? How does it fit into your research? How does it help you shape your argument? How can you use it in your research project? You don't have to answer each of these, but they can help you get started.
Stylistically, a good annotation features concise and direct statement, active voice, and highly specific exposition. We’ll spend some time looking at sample annotated bibliographies and reviewing some of the more obscure details of MLA research documentation as necessary.
Requirements:
- Prepare 10 annotations for this assignment.
- Each annotation should be at least 100 but no longer than 300 words.
- At least four of your sources must be scholarly, peer-reviewed journal articles.
Your bibliography must be prepared according to current MLA guidelines for manuscript format and documentation.
As we'll discuss elsewhere, this will be prepared and organized collaboratively, in Google Docs. The final bibliography is due Friday, 3/29.
