Description:

This assignment brings together a number of the researching, reading, and writing skills we have been studying and practicing.  Your annotated bibliography will help you prepare for writing your argument paper by giving you a chance to read, summarize, evaluate, and respond to your research sources before writing the argument paper, and it will give me an overview of your topic and the research sources you are consulting.

A "bibliography" is a list of sources of information on a given subject.   Often, the entries on a bibliography follow a certain format and are alphabetized.   An "annotated" bibliography differs from a "regular" bibliography in that a paragraph (or more) of commentary follows the citation of each source.

Please word-process your paper and follow the appearance of the samples discussed in class.  Your annotated bibliography will be evaluated based on the correctness of your source citations and on the quality and clarity of your annotations—write, revise, edit, and proofread everything carefully.

Requirements:

• Your annotated bibliography should include five (5) of your research sources.   Of the five sources, there should be a mix of "traditional" and "electronic" sources—books, magazine articles, journal articles, newspaper articles, internet articles, WWW sites, interviews, etc.
  
• The citation for each source will follow the MLA format for that type of source, and the citations will be alphabetized according to MLA guidelines.
  
• There will be two annotations following each source citation:

A one-paragraph summary of the source: you will want to provide the central idea ("thesis") and main ideas/sections of the source, and you may want to include the author's purpose, audience, or context for writing (approximately 150 words).

A one-paragraph evaluation of the source: you will want to address issues of usefulness, relevance, currency, range of viewpoints, authority, credibility, and reliability.  You could comment on the strengths or weaknesses of the source; you could comment on the source's usefulness to you as a researcher or its usefulness to you for this paper; you could highlight what makes the source unique; or you could make a connection between one source and another, pointing out how they support or contradict each other (approximately 150 words).