This assignment asks you to produce a working annotated bibliography of at least 8 sources. You will annotate all of the sources, and offer expanded annotations for 4 key sources that you are most likely to use for your Critical Voices in Conversation (CVC) essay. I will grade the bibliographies in equal parts on your correct use of MLA citation conventions for works cited entries, on the quality and relevance of your sources as well as their range, and on how clearly your annotations fulfill their task of describing, summarizing, and evaluating each source. By “range,” I simply mean that many projects call for productively different kinds of sources: primary and secondary, pop-cultural and academic, biographical and critical, sources about the text itself and ones that provide a theoretical or methodological background. What will your project require? What information and ideas will best support it?
Your Annotated Bibliography should contain the following:
- A correct MLA bibliography entry for each of your 8 sources
- A cohesive 5-7 sentence paragraph for 4 of your sources that:
- Introduces your source (1 sentence), offering a more detailed verbalization of the MLA entry noting what kind of source this is (e.g. a book, an article from a respected peer-reviewed journal, an author interview, and so on).
- Succinctly summarizes your source (3 sentences) focusing on those aspects of the argument that will be most relevant to your project.
- Offers a statement of value for your source (2 sentences) in which you respond more subjectively–and, if fitting, analytically–to the source and the potential value it might hold for your project.
- A brief annotation for the remaining 4 sources similar to those examples found in 5.3.2 in the MLA Handbook (130). These annotations only need to be a single, informational sentence (a briefer version of the summary portion of the more expanded annotation).
The writing for these annotations should be clear and informative. I have composed a sample annotation using a source very familiar to us all at this point: Sue-Im Lee’s article on Tropic of Orange. Please feel free to use this as a guide for your own annotations.