Annotated Bibliography Assignment

English 1121: College Writing and Critical Reading

Spring 2004 / Section 13

Annotated Bibliography

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 medical patient synthesis essay by giving you a chance to read, summarize, and evaluate your research sources before writing the essay, 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 sample discussed in class. Your annotated bibliography will be evaluated holistically 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:

1.) Your annotated bibliography should include five (5) of your research sources. Of the five sources, there should be a variety of “traditional” and “electronic” sources—books, magazine articles, journal articles, newspaper articles, internet articles, WWW sites, interviews, etc. (Note: some "traditional" sources can now be accessed electronically via databases and/or the internet.)

2.) The bibliographic citation for each source will follow the MLA format for that type of source, and the citations will be alphabetized according to MLA guidelines.

3.) The annotation following each source citation will have two parts:

A brief (2-3 sentence) summary of the source: you will want to provide the main ideas/events of the source, and you may want to include information about the writer and/or the writer's purpose, audience, or context for writing.
A brief (2-3 sentence) evaluation of the source: you will want to address issues of usefulness, relevance, currency, range of viewpoints, authority, credibility, and reliability. See BNCH Chapter 9, pages 132-141, for information on evaluating both print and electronic sources.