Return to Workshop Sheets

Annotated Bibiography Assignment

(5% of Your Overall Grade)

An annotated bibliography provides both a complete reference to a text and a brief summary of it. To compile one, you must select sources, read them critically, and present them accurately. The bibliography should be an excellent reference for you or for someone else interested in sources relevant to the topic.

• Honing your library/research skills
• Reinforces your critical reading skills
• Gathers information base that may be used in the context of the next two paper assignments

Purpose: You should briefly but accurately summarize carefully selected sources.

Audience: You, your classmates, and me.

• Find appropriate articles and/or essays that dovetail with a potential paper topic for your convincing and/or persuading papers.
• Consult at least 3 different indexes in your search.
• Provide a complete reference and annotation (an accurate, concise summary that retains the tone of the original) for 5 articles and/or essays.
• Use Modern Language Association (MLA) style for listing references. (References should be listed in alphabetical order.)
• Demonstrate that you have selected your sources carefully.

Annotations: Crusius and Channell, authors of The Aims of Argument relate that your annotations should include:

• "A sentence or two about the rhetorical context of the source. Is it an informative news article, an opinion column, a scholarly essay? Is it intended for lawyers, the public, students, the elderly? What is the bias?"
• "A capsule summary of the content."
• "A note about why this source seems valuable and how you might use it."

The completed bibliography should be 3 to 5 processed pages in length. Be prepared to share your bibliography with other members of the class.

Potential Topics (Please feel free to work on other topics not in this list but they must be appropriate to our course topic for this semester. Note: these should be narrowed considerably, but I hope that noting just a few starting points might help you generate a topic that interests you!)